


The Performer

by toziesque



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Online Dating, Angst, Depression, Fix-It of Sorts, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gay Richie Tozier, I don't know if we can call it online dating or romance. it's one sided romance to begin with lol, Just to confirm, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Online Romance, Pining, Richie gets the 'Wall' treatment, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Therapy, Twitter, believe me there's angst lol, the clown is not active in this plot, there is a reason why eddie is mean about/to richie, you will see
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2020-10-20 03:29:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 42,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20668571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toziesque/pseuds/toziesque
Summary: The delicacy of a man made numb by a life long effort to keep everything out, and the archaic entrance of a trigger in the form of an anti-Trashmouth Twitter activist.@doctor_k: Richie Tozier's comedy is duller than the ache in my left testicle. #trashmouth"It consumes us from the inside until we don't have a choice anymore."(A slight AU in which the phone calls don't come, but Richie and Eddie find each other, anyway)





	1. The Complication of a Man Behind a Cracked Screen (pt.1)

These infinite notifications. Richie scrolls and scrolls, sips something cold and sour, scrolls some more and airs a sigh.  
When did it get this boring? When did popularity become such a stale concept? When, in his endless search for validation and attention, did he surpass satisfaction and mow straight off the edge of it and plummet to an entirely different notion? To a place where, unexpectedly, the attention is deadly? He knows when the scales tipped; it was the day is feet stood on a stage and an audience cackled at his command, the very first time. But he carried on with it - laughter became a hook he couldn't function without, a delicious appetiser to the lifestyle that came after. The money, the fame, the adoration, they were the real highs, the things he grappled for. Riding the success warps reality, and all this materialism is impossible to refuse when it's constantly wheeled in on silver platters and waved under an attention addicts nose. He'd made it, alright. He's a famous comedian, the marvelled Trashmouth, and paid a bomb to be himself. What could be better than making a living from making people laugh?  
Except the laughter was just a gateway drug, and the rest of it? He's in too deep to notice that it's all slowly killing him. Hypnotised by a bursting bank balance and deafened by hilarity.  
He needs something to ground him, something that forces a come down. An antibody to the comedy, to the praise. So he scrolls and feeds on the hate from a faceless community.

His finger pauses on the mouse pad, he reads the tweet three times. He laughs. "That's actually pretty funny." He says to himself, and reads it again. Everything he reads after that is nothing shy of disappointing; his method of a harsh reality check seems to have been ruined by one savage tweet. Until he finds another one:

Maybe not as funny as the first, but nevertheless, Richie puffs short bursts of laughter from his mouth as though the notion of humour is his to give and not receive. An alien feeling in his mouth, one that compels him to look for more material to trigger it. How long had it been since someone gave him a taste of his own medicine? He wishes he knew.

“Good one!” He snorts, and his noise fetches the attention of his only companion, Graham. A ridiculous name for a Pomeranian (as one would expect of a full time comedian), he knows full well - but Richie’s phase of Britpop adoration back in the 90’s needed honouring. When he bought the dog home four years back, the search for a name was un-triumphant until the unnamed puppy took a piss on the lower shelf of Richie’s record collection, and ‘Leisure’ by Blur was ruined. Richie took that as an unceremonious declaration of the dog’s hatred for Britpop, and so to spite him, named him Graham after Graham Coxon. It’s a private joke, one that he’s thankful to say has not made it into his material. But then, nothing personal ever does.

Graham bounds over, leaps onto Richie’s lap and demands the attention that Richie has been giving to someone anonymous. He looks into the beady eyes of his only true friend and bites back an apology. ‘Sorry that I gave you such a weird name’, he would have said, except the apology ferments in his mind instead, and becomes totally introspective: I’m sorry that you’ve made it to 40 with only a dog called Graham to love you.

One hand now commandeered by the dog’s need for behind-the-ear scratches, the other hovers a finger over the username of the jokester that so amusingly orchestrated such a brutal Twitter take down of Richie’s career. He feels weird, knows how it should make him feel to be so ripped to shreds but - well, did he not seek it out? Did he not resort to the internet in search of slander to offer him some semblance of a reality check? Sure. That was it exactly. Except, his intentions backfired, he thinks. He’s not feeling grounded, his reality’s not in check. He’s not feeling hurt, or hated, or bitter for the life he’s chosen. He feels something he can’t fathom and, as he knocks back the last of his drink, wonders whether more liquor will help him digest this undetectable emotion with better, slicker ease. Richie’s not sure, but he thinks it might be intrigue. Intrigue at the very least and excitement at most. Something else flickers in his periphery, and that’s the disadvantage of his intoxication; it’s too far on the edges for him to decipher. There’s a fleeting dash of a moment in which his finger commits to left click the username and his vision lights up, bright white and glaring, and he recognises the outskirt-lingering feeling. He can’t be absolutely sure, nor can he understand the source of it, but he swears he feels it smack his temple so hard it could have knocked his glasses across the room. Nostalgia.

The feeling came with a name, paired with a small icon of a strangely familiar face, and a short lined, satirical bio. Eddie Kaspbrak looks from a tiny circle, doe eyed, goofy expression held, and Richie knows his face - he’s sure he does, but he just can’t work it out. The bio reads “First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me!” - so the man has good humour and good taste. Richie recognises the quote and, much like that unknown sentiment latching to the rim of his glasses and refusing to dissipate (the one that looked and felt a lot like nostalgia), only a taste of a smile rests on his lips, enough to lick away and enjoy for moments only. He doesn’t understand why he’s so impelled to delve deeper into the social media mock up version of this man’s life, and he won’t comprehend for a good while yet. For now, it’ll only do to bask in the stranger’s online assassination of Richie himself, and forgive him for feeling somewhat flattered. It’s the alcohol, and - though he’d never care to admit it - the loneliness. 

This guy…!" Hand over mouth, Richie's eyes screw shut with the titter he doesn't let break through the bars that his fingers make. He can't finish the sentence because he simply doesn't know how to. There's a few variations; this guy is hilarious, this guy is an asshole, but the way the statement hangs in the air concludes it better than any finishing word would. I'm really fucking curious about this guy. He loves the heavy self depreciation, the addition of ripping himself to shreds alongside the slander of Richie's 'work' that he plasters on the sterile white Twitter feed. Richie isn't much good at translating first impressions, always takes a little while figuring people out, and by the time he’s ready, he often finds those he’s de-riddling have grown impatient and long since left. But through a crack in a wall (built around mysterious origin) somewhere at the back of his mind, jeers a thought: 

_First impressions of Eddie Kaspbrak? You made those 30 odd years ago!  
_

He’s deaf to it. It’s drowned out by the clattering tap of his keyboard as he logs out and resigns as Richie Tozier for tonight.

Whilst a multitude of conflicting feelings of indifference to his public profile do constantly brew tornadoes in his head, he’s sensible enough not to flush it all down the drain in some embarrassing display of… Well, there’s the thing - display of what? He doesn’t even know what he’s risking. Would he risk anything by messaging this proclaimed hater of his? Probably not. But there’s something in him that wants to start this interaction (should it transpire) free of any presumptions. Void of this hatred that ‘Eddie Kaspbrak’ spews of him on the internet. He doesn’t want to be Richie ‘Trashmouth’ Tozier, not now. He’s just hiding behind the prospect of public humiliation, just kidding himself that his reasoning to go in under an alias is to preserve his reputation. He’ll work it out later. For now, he clicks the follow button and starts a retweet. 

Graham grumbles beside him, and paws at his fraying sleeve. “What? Too perverse?” Richie asks a question that will go unanswered, not that it needs answering in the first place. “You’re right, ‘Ham. I’ve never been good at playing it cool.” 

_What the fuck am I trying to play cool? _

His conscience begins to scratch at the backs of his eyes just as he slams the lid of his laptop shut, and restless, he stretches from his seat and pads across his apartment with it’s huge, empty windows and masculine, industrial decor. It’s never been to his taste, and he accepts with woe that it’s far too grand of a place for a lamenting bachelor and his tiny dog. He takes to his empty bed, upon which Graham cacoons against the vacant pillow, and Richie’s tired, exhausted even. His head feels like it’s run for miles with no stops, no hydration, no hope of destination. Maybe he got the come down he was searching for, after all - he just never expected the symptoms that riddle his bones and muscles now. He’d purged, sought out a destructive appointment with naked truth. He’d got something he hadn’t expected, something he hadn’t gone out looking for, and what twists his knotted mind more, is the fact that he’s not even sure what he gained. A name, a singular picture, and some masterfully sculpted insults.

Masochism powers him to reach for his phone on the nightstand beside him, and after the initial battle with the blue light shocking his eyes, he opens up Twitter. He logs out, locks Trashmouth out of the room once more, and checks himself into the domain of his alias account. A notification awaits, and his heart careers over a speedbump in his chest.

_@doctor_k started following you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (jokes by jimmy carr)


	2. The Complication of a Man Behind a Cracked Screen (pt.2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter focuses on what Richie is experiencing with his mental health, so should matters of depression be triggering, please read with caution as vague references ahead.

He paid a fortune for that laptop. Retrospectively, he’d been a fool. What sales person doesn’t leap at the opportunity of an upsell when a celebrity walks into their shop? A middle aged, self confessed technophobe of a celebrity, too. Fuck, how the associate and his colleagues must have rubbed their palms together after he left; Trashmouth Tozier just bought us a few rounds of drinks, what a sucker, he literally let us rob him blind… poor guy.  
He can afford it.  
Is it worth the price he paid for it? How is Richie supposed to know? But for something so ‘top of the range’ (as it was sold to him), it sure does kick up a hell of a noise. Whirring, rattling, like a loose arm of a propeller, and of late it’s an inescapable, consistent noise that stays put in his cavernous brain long after being shut down. He’s beginning to wonder if it’s the laptop making the noise at all. Could it be the whirring of a hot and restless mind with no comfort to offer absorption, and only vacant walls and empty spaces to bounce against? Likely, yes, but a dangerous resolution to reach. A man of his status refrains from such acceptance of tragedy and instead opts to preserve a masquerade of dignity. Things such as this are condemned to disregard, and locked in the spare room that’s furnished itself with manifestations of all that Richie ignores.

The laptop clatters louder this morning than it did through the night, and Richie rises early, after sleep stopped it’s teasing and stepped aside from absolution.

He refreshes his Twitter feed with his first cup of coffee. Nothing.  
He refreshes it again 20 minutes later; it’s the first thing he does when he steps out of the shower. Nothing.  
With his breakfast, there’s nothing; with Graham’s first walk of the day, nothing; midday passes and still, nothing. The day falls beneath the pink yawn of sunset and, inevitably, there’s little that the tugging down of the twitter feed does to pacify his most strange desire.  


Tedium  


Tedium  


Tedium...

“I’m pathetic,” he breathes to the musky twilight, and sitting on the terrace of his penthouse apartment, the insult to himself feels akin to stale air and he wonders if he’s even breathing at all. Beneath his stretched out legs, a bridge between a cushioned seat and a rattan footstool, Graham cocks his funny little head. He’s a responsive thing, but with it being only the two of them in the apartment, it’s only natural for him to assume his master’s voice solely addresses him. In this case, the optimism of the Pomeranian is mislead. Early evening light splinters in spidered shapes, but collect in corners of the terrace that Richie sits away from. They're not enough to touch his skin with the day's last breaths of warmth, not enough to shatter the incongruous pitch black night that encompasses his sluggish body.

It's cold in this corner where he sits, cold and dark, and loud. It’s never not loud anymore, there’s never silence. Chicago conducts its own cacophony, endless and shrill, but inside Richie’s head persists a constant thunderstorm. A tenebrosity of a mindset, it’s clouds parting only occasionally but ever looming somewhere on the horizon, he can coat it’s torrential conditions in plastic to cope. The humour he puts up as shelter keeps him dry enough, but it’s never completely waterproof, and eventually the laughter and applause mimic the crack of thunder, and his personal deluge soaks his toes through holes in his shoes.

Never mind the evening summer sun and it’s tendrils of glorious light - in Richie’s life, it’s raining buckets, and it has been for a long time.

He knocks his head back to lean against sizzling brick just as Graham hops up, made sanguine by the sound of his owner’s voice. Richie, as if by discipline, loops a lazy arm around the dog’s tiny, cashmere soft frame, and while the eyes behind their foggy frames are closed, Graham’s delighted face is a picture that Richie can coherently imagine, and it does a little justice in lifting his heavy heart.

A tinny noise percolates the partial peace, and Richie mechanically swipes to answer the incoming call.

“Yeah,” he answers, a standard fashion of a clipped and impassive tone.

The voice at the other end sounds jovial, but like it's only been sprayed on an unprimed surface to mask a horror of stress. Richie's imagination creates an image of cracked veneers, shiny suits and dollar sign contact lenses. "Rich! You’re alive!”

Richie’s brow is understandably creased, and he takes time with his response. Words move laboriously on his tongue and he can’t remember the last time he’d spoken to another human. “Yeah, still ticking,” he finally says with audible confusion. “You can stop production of those missing posters.”

Of course, he’d retort to some level of humour, but the joke churns his stomach as though it was of severely poor taste. Through the speaker, his manager chuckles.

“Tell you what; I’ll send you what’s been printed, you sign them, I’ll flog them. Think of the profit!”

“Sure. I know I can always count on you to make money out of my misfortune, Fred.” He doesn’t mean for it, but a sincerity seeps through, a sadness drips upon the microphone.

Fred delays, and then: “Everything alright, Rich?”

Pausing on the query, Richie inhales for intended purpose - fills his lungs, cleanses the venom - and exhales filtered breath. “Yeah,” he says unconvincingly, and then sharpens his voice to sway persuasion. “I’m fine. Why?”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“Well, I am.”

“You’ve been avoiding my calls. I’ve been worried,” Richie notes that Fred does, in fact, sound worried, and the curtain drops in his head to show the normal, human man behind the projection of a megalomaniac, money-making manager. It’s just Fred, his friend of 10 or so years and yet, somewhere along the lines Richie had re-imagined him as some reptilian puppeteer that relentlessly straddled his aching back and gave him no peace. The thing is, Richie would come to establish, is that he cannot recall the transition his mind had made of Fred from friend to villain. Fred adds in a smooth voice that could never belong to a reptile, “I’ve genuinely been worried, Richie.”

And it breaks him just a little to hear a friend confess the symptoms that he himself has caused. A quietude lapses and skirts beneath the static that connects both men’s ears. Eventually, Richie urges himself to speak.

“Sorry, Fred. I didn’t-” he didn’t even realise his phone had been ringing. He lowers it from his ear to check and, sure enough, there’s six missed calls. There’s no fathoming how those rang on deaf ears when he’s been so conscious of noise. “-I’ve just been a bit in the dumps, that’s all.” he lies.

“You’ll be alright for next week though, won’t you buddy?”

“Next week?”

“The New York dates?”

“Those are in July-” and of course, Fred sounds further concerned, which Richie soon comes to acknowledge. This series of shows, a medley of renowned comedians collaborating, had been pencilled in for the best part of the year.

“It is July, Rich.”

Richie could have sworn it was May. He doesn’t have time to quibble and rationalise with his introspective turmoil over months, for Fred is back in business mode.

“They’ve changed the format of the shows so it’s more quickfire. Kind of like a rap battle but with comedy. I know it’s short notice, but I’m gonna need you to compress your bits down - you’ll be rotating in slots of ten minutes each.”

_Ten minutes each._

Those simple words seem to echo infinitely, and with each reverberation Fred’s voice morphs, changing pitch, changing age, becoming someone Richie no longer knows. But used to. Oh, how he used to know that voice. A similar pang of nostalgia as he’d felt yesterday capers the steady beat of his heart, and he swallows a choke.

“I’ll sort it out,” he says bluntly, and before giving his manager the liberty of a panic attack, he slips into some affectionate method of soothing a worried man and uses a nickname he never has before. “Thanks for calling, Freds.”

* * *

In bed he winds in stiff white sheets and tries to slow his rapid paced brain. He can’t think where the day has gone, despite the rate with which his mind races, never mind where the months have passed by. He has nothing for next week’s shows, nor has he reached out to arrange his normally opted for lazy option of another writer. It seems as though impending collapse is weighing heavy on his head, and fractures in his foundations are widening with the hours. Richie cannot even decipher how long he has remained contained to these four walls, how long Graham has been the only existing thing in his orbit - time had sprinted from him and he’d simply missed the starting gun.

He lies trapped in his body for another night, or so it feels, for it isn’t as late as he guessed when his phone lands in his palm. It reads 10:08pm, 12th July 2016. He checks Twitter, diverts straight to the page that had captured him the night before, and sure enough, the timestamps had altered, spreading across recent days from July 1st right up to today.

Today!

It’s inevitable; Richie smiles. He goes to retweet but then halts. A retweet wouldn’t do for tonight. Bravely, timidly, he finds the direct messages and sends something brief:

**Really giving Trashmouth a hard time, huh?**

He adds a laughing emoji at the last moment, and holds his breath once he sees it’s sent. He doesn’t expect something back so quick. The message ding, the sight of his icon in the inbox, all could be accused as the reason why Richie’s throat closed over for a few moments.

**Eddie Kaspbrak: **trashmouth can suck my farts!

Richie’s laughter is hushed beneath the sheets, and he reads the message over a few times, like a kid might do with a note passed clandestinely during class.

**graham’s sad dad:** you run the ‘down-with-trashmouth’ support club?  


**Eddie Kaspbrak:** link me  


**graham’s sad dad: **oh so you’re not his number one hater? Sorry, I must have slid into the wrong DM’s.

**Eddie Kaspbrak: **you don’t have the link to it?

**Graham’s sad dad: **I don’t think there is one man…

**Eddie Kaspbrak:** brb starting a kickstarter to get the funds for my ‘I hate Richie Tozier club’. thanks for the inspo dude.

Richie doesn’t think he’s ever experienced joy from bickering before but, even in thinking that, feels a sense of argumentative feist that tells him that he has enjoyed it before. He’s lived for it before. Sentimentality derives his better judgement, and he types something that doesn’t complete the journey from his fingertips to the keypad. He falls asleep with his phone in his hand, and Eddie Kaspbrak in his head.

‘I swear I know you from somew-’


	3. The Complication of a Man Behind a Cracked Screen (pt.3)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *further mental health tw, symbolic description of depression ahead*

Beams of hissing light blister through Venetian blinds and creep their way across his slumbering body as the morning progresses, and when they slash red pressure on his eyelids, he stirs awake. Though he is swamped in residual sleep, it's unequivocal that the night time, for once, was kind to him. In fact, the morning has extended its hospitality to Richie's rest, too; the digital alarm clock (void of purpose) read's 10:46am. There's an initial stab of panic that slams through his sternum like a bus into a wall, but despite being temporarily winded, he heals quickly in the realization that there's no where he needs to be. Nothing he needs to do. No one he needs to see….

And those revelations that, to many, might be considered a novelty and come swathed in comfort, do nothing but sink him deeper into the smothering embrace of his bed sheets. And here he will stay until day becomes night once more, here he will remain encased in his own head. It's hit and miss these days as to whether he'll wake up in open air, or in a shallow grave, but the days that unfurl with the latter secure him to that grave indefinitely. Clawing his way to the surface is an impossibility when the weight of the earth crowds his bones with ineluctable lethargy, and so the weight of the earth sedates him and he simply submits to it. This is one of those days, and all he knows to do now is to remember to breathe. While the world stands still and his body cerments, his brain liquifies and crawls up the walls. He's powerless to it's actions as it seeps out of his ears and morphs, becomes a tar like thing oozing its way across the room and choking him on its pollution. A toxic mass, a ponderous sludge from his own now hollow skull seeks to suffocate him, and leave him decaying until some poor soul finds him.

In this murky bog of thick, fermenting nothingness, he hears one tortuous whisper that rattles through the gaps between the mindsets density. 

_I swear I know you from…_

He moves a fraction, clutches the pillow to his ear.

_I swear I…_

His face knots up, the first considerable movement he's made all day - however long the day has been. He's trying to decipher it, trying to crack the riddle of it. What did he mean by it, why had he been so pressed to type it out while on such fragile borders of sleep and wake? Why does it feel like a conscious thought, but lurk so far away in his mind? Despite the dimness of the landscape in his head, there are no torches lighting his way to working out his question. All he can manage is to wade through the muddy depths and be guided by the steam that rises from tepid water as his breath hits it's surface. You don't know him, he silently shouts, how can you know him? He's just a picture on the internet. He's just a name. He's nobody, so why are you kidding yourself, why are you making him feel like-

He turns on his side and he holds himself in a way no one ever has before.

_Why does he feel like something to me. I don't even know the guy._

_I don't even know him._

_I can't stop thinking about him._

A beep sounds, and holds him out a torch to see a little clearer. He takes the torch, he scans around, but he can't quite lift himself out of the lowering fog. Another beep puts a torch in the other hand.

Soon he can see again.

It's 11:15am but it had felt like hours, and the beeps? The source of them makes his stomach flip.

**Eddie Kaspbrak:** no one's funding my cause **Eddie Kaspbrak:** it's a noble cause I don't get it

They came through ten minutes ago. Richie can't begin to understand how time moves in such incoherent orders when his head is in this state of limbo, and it never fails to irritate him with how difficult things are to reach. In this instance, he has struggled to lift a finger to his phone, and therefore the messages from the man residing behind the screen, and in his addled brain, had gone unanswered for ten minutes. Unforgivable.

But nevertheless, something hoists him from the depths of his dark, oceanic despair. Something holds his chin where he can breathe and eases him to pawing waves.  
Now, the bed sheets begin to feel softer, more akin to a hug than a grip. He let's them swallow him with a newfound warmth. The density of the fog thins out and draws back, the tide pulls out and though he can see it, though he can smell it, he's able to walk along the shore without his misery drowning him. 

A dimple of a smile forms as he types out a reply.

**grahams sad dad: **maybe you're just his one and only dedicated hater

His thumb hovers over the tiny picture of Eddie. The beat of his heart is telling him to touch it and explore, but the lap of his melancholy tide prevents him. 

**Eddie Kaspbrak: **the fuck, man? I thought I'd found an ally in you

Richie's lips remain a perfect crescent as the correspondence unfolds. His head is somewhat tranquil meanwhile his chest contains a stampede.

R: oh you were just trying to recruit me?  
E: yeah what else did you think this was  
R: the beginning of a beautiful friendship  
E: I don't need friends I need followers  
R: woah. cool it, fuhrer  
E: it was your idea, fuckwad!

And it feels so familiar. Richie takes a breather, summons some slight remainder of applicable composure. Eddie is quick with his replies, seemingly hot headed and equally hot fingered. Funny how those roasting replies manage to heat Richie's cheeks, too. 

R: I guess it was. I could go on about all the things that I hate about the guy for days

It's true. He could.

E: I could too  
R: is this what they call a meet cute?  
E: bonding over shared hatred for a shitty comedian? we could call it that, I guess

Oh God, his blood stopped it's commute through his veins then, his heart having failed. His fingers jam up and he can't process a reply, so dives and diverts.

R: at least he's kind of an acutely self aware has-been  
E: he's an ignorant never-was, what are you saying??  
R: nothing good, I promise 🙏  
E: better not be. not in my inbox 👊👊

He sends an emoji with a halo and finds familiarity in its beaming, rosy cheeks. The next message that he types completes arduously, for he's somewhat afraid to ask - unless, of course, he's misinterpreting his anticipation for self preservation.

R: how come you hate him so much anyway?

As soon as the message leaves the text box, Richie swallows a pint glass of thorns. The question carries enormous value, even though there's nothing Eddie could say that would sway his option on himself either way. He can't work out the importance of the answer, but he waits with bated breath nevertheless. The reply seems to take a lifetime to notify.

E: I don't know. Never been able to put my finger on it. I just really do. He's not funny like at all. He really gets under my skin and I don't know why

You'd think that would devastate him, mortify him to think of someone so actively despising him. He should be heartbroken that he's drawn such natural hatred out of someone's, and yet, he's elated. Richie reads the message over and over, his cheeks pinched pink, his smile wide and goofy - you'd think he'd just been flattered to within an inch of his life. As a matter of fact, he'd been slandered. He takes immense pleasure in a way he never thought would be possible to him, in batting back a reply.

R: that was weak reasoning, dude  
E: fuck you bro!


	4. The Complication of a Man Behind a Cracked Screen (pt.4)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahead is a pretty imagery packed description of sleep paralysis.  
Elements of this are inspired by Revolution Number 9 (backwards - listen with caution, for this audio has played on my mind for ten years), and Fitter, Happier by Radiohead.  
I scared myself writing this.  
Enjoy.

>   
R: you literally have no reason to hate the guy and yet here you are heading the Trashmouth Twitter Takedown for lonely fuckboys  
E: ok firstly it's hardly that I have no reason I have plenty just none are jumping out as significant right now because you're in my ear about it. second of all I'm not a fuckboy I'm 40 years old asshole  
R: haha  
R: first of all, doctor turdface, I'm technically not in your ears I'm in your eyes so  
R: second of all, no way me too  


It ends there, not ten minutes after it began. Richie feels some semblance of heartbreak plummet his entire abdomen down 50 floors, feels disappointment stiffen the rest of him like rigamortis. He waits with hopefulness to no avail; Eddie doesn’t message back.

It’s hard, keeping his head above the waves, when it was Eddie’s messages that had lifted him above them. He wasn’t made happy by the conversation. He wasn’t cured - fuck, he had a long way to go, and if he thought a brief exchange with a stranger over Twitter was all he needed to fix him, longer still. Somewhere within him sits a realist, a cynical old man in an armchair, a tut grazing the fibres of his moustache and a roll of his eyes just ready and waiting. The realist loses a little patience every time Richie unlocks his phone to check the notifications, and sighs; _that’s not going to help you, boy.M/em>_

__

If anything, it runs the risk of sending him trudging a few steps back. His dummy Twitter account holds only tumbleweed and a breeze that rattles a lonely letterbox. 

__

But at the very least, the conversation with Eddie had reminded him that he’s not the only person in the world. Somewhere, Eddie Kaspbrak exists. Somewhere, Richie Tozier cracks a joke and Eddie only grimaces. It’s you he hates, he reminds himself as well, don’t forget that the guy he thinks he’s talking to doesn’t exist - how fucked up are you? It’s you he hates. _He hates you._  


__

**He hates me.**  


__

Richie smiles, and Graham licks his cheek. 

__

From his cacoon of lazy clothes and less than crisp white linen, he feels the day changing, morning to afternoon, and it’s guilt that eventually drags him from the dent in the mattress his body had made. “Graham,” he calls, and his formally forgotten housemate pads out of the room behind him.

__

He gets a walk, Belmont Harbor, and it restores a little meaning to Richie’s ragged self-worth to see his little dog enjoying just existing. Richie sinks into the sand while Graham skips along the shoreline of fresh water. He prays that no one will bother him, and doubts anyone will - his body language warns off anyone even considering it. He watches Graham and his simplistic pleasure, while Richie stews in a resentment of himself, and the way his thumb continues to habitually pull down a page on his phone that doesn’t change. He detests the emptiness of his inbox, cringes at the unanswered message, punishes himself by returning to it far too often. It would be too much to message him again, wouldn’t it? It’s only been an hour.

__

_“Fuck me!”_ he hisses to the sand, watches it whirlwind away like the sharp dance of beach particles in a storm. This whole situation is ridiculous. This whole thing is fucking insane. I’m fucking insane. His fibreglass heart disintegrates, overworked and weathered by a lifetime's worth of confusion hitting in 48 hours. Its fragments join the sand, are captured by the waves, and washed into the lake where its depths are nothing compared to the profundity of his chest. No motion sickness out there, no turbulence, no threat of capsizing. 

__

When he’s walking home, Graham trotting between his ankles having had the best day of his life (since yesterday, until tomorrow), Richie’s phone receives a buzz. It’s from Fred, and instinctively Richie groans.

__

He flicks the message open. It reads:

__

__

> _  
Haters are out for you right now, Rich. Use it to your advantage.  
_

_And an article is linked:  
**‘Trashmouth: Tired Out, Tragic, or All Of The Above?’**_

Without thinking, he pings the link straight on to his number one hater.

__

> __
> 
>   
R: saw this and thought of you  

> 
> __

_   
_

His phone slips back into his pocket, and he slips back into chastising himself for being such a fucking-

__

There’s a buzz just as the phone leaves his fingertips.

__

>   
E: stop thinking about me I have a wife  


Why is Richie laughing? As if mechanically, he replies teasingly, and gets instant, hot headed responses.

>   
R: does your wife know how much time you spend tweeting about Richie Tozier?  
E: she knows not to disturb me when I'm on my laptop  
R: so you're saying you lock yourself away...with your laptop...to tweet about Richie Tozier?  
E: yeah and?  
E: wait  
R: haha. You sure you hate him….???  
E: fuck you dude  


When he’s filled with words that dare to spill upon the keyboard, he locks his phone and pockets it. For good, this time. Dangerous, he tells himself. Say nothing else. Walk away now.

__

He walks to the liquor store and sinks the rest of the day in bourbon and cigarettes.

__

* * *

__

He wakes in darkness, without a start, and thinks half hour, maybe, that's why I'm so wide awake. But he isn't, he can feel it as it slowly reminds each limb, each section of skin. Sleep is still upon him, holding him, restraining him to his bed with thick silicone straps. But he can see his waking vision, see the moonlit blur of his bedroom, feel the delicate pants of Graham on the pillow beside him. His stomach churns and the scene spins, but encased in concrete, Richie can only let it, his eyes following the turbulent motions that his intoxication steers. It's only his eyes that can move and what good is that? They're unaided, weak, and yet they cannot close. They dart about the room as though they're panicked of their own accord, and Richie's locked in consciousness pales in keeping up with them. Each corner before him is examined, each cobweb traced, each peeling piece of plaster peaked at. It's his room; soulless, unkempt, arid. As it should be.

__

So why does that disturb him so? To find everything in its place? He wishes he had the equilibrium to settle the panic that commandeers his vision, but his numb body lays still, and his foggy mind has lost command. Sight persisting to perplex him, lids insisting wide openness, he lies and endures the journey over nothingness that it takes.

__

He sees nothing out of the ordinary. He hears it first. Slow, tinny, robotic.

__

"Can't… see…"

__

His heart best rises a notch, his eyes dart to the right.

__

"Can't. Can't. Ssseee."

__

To the left this time.

__

"S-s-s-s-"

__

And ahead, but no source to be found.

__

"Can't."

__

The voice is female, he thinks. A static hisses beneath it, and void of any emotion, any humanity, it completes its sentence so close to his ear that he manages a whimper through useless lips as it says: "can't...see... me…"

__

It has breath like pins and they stick in his lobes. He cannot make the calculative conclusion as to whether he feels it breathe against his skin or not; its voice is so inhuman that it must surely only possess lungs of iron. Nevertheless, his fear simulates something akin to the rattle of air through a cavernous mouth, and as it speaks again, his eyes drift in the direction of the path of goosebumps it summons.

__

"Want...to see…"

__

It's moved across the room, volume cadencing as it goes and Richie's struggling eyes follow.

__

"Want to see...him?"

__

Confusion cannot surpass the terror building in his head as it enlarges his pupils and engulfs his iris' in salt water, and he cannot blink it away. Vision now veiled as if behind frosted glass, he casts frantic glances to the end of his bed, to the door, the window, to the left corner, to the right corner...and in that last directional look, a translucent blur begins to form.

__

"Look." It says, and Richie does so. Obeys, but only out of fear.

__

The figure is small, grey, and has no discernible features. It's so insignificant in the lighting it's given that it could have been a smudge on Richie's glasses - except, he isn't wearing his glasses, and smudges don't speak. Smudges don't move, either, and much to Richie's chagrin, he cannot dismiss the shape that shuffles sideways against the wall to be something as simple as a smudge. It's voice, clearer now, airs its first coherent sentence:

__

"You... hhhhhhave to look at me."

__

_I am looking, _Richie wants to shout, but cannot. The thing shambles forward in a way that makes it look so much bigger than it is, a laborious heave. Still, he cannot define its features but now it's closer, he sees its hands are covering its face. Morbid curiosity wonders what it's hiding, but fear and sense tells him that he doesn't want to know.

__

"Don't...look...for...him."

__

Richie works out (between his chaotic layers of panic) now that it's closer what makes its empty voice so horrible. The way it drifts from word to word, how they inharmoniously connect, serrated, somehow flickering - it sounds like a voice being played backwards, like how experimental artists would hide messages in their lyrics that could only be uncovered in reverse. If he had the choice to decode it's words, he wouldn't - he'd never spin the record anti clockwise.

__

It’s closer still when it says repeats:

__

“Don’t...look...for...hiiiim...”

__

Too close. Too loud.

__

Too, all of a sudden, dark.

__

He’s a fool to think it’s over, to think it’s gone, but hope slows his pulse and let’s his breathing in a little deeper to his lungs. Still stuck stiff as a board to his bed, his useless eyes hurtle around a black void, and everything feels so empty.

__

And then emptiness is snatched from him quicker than he knew it was there.

__

"Me first.” The creature sounds from above, its mangled, backwards voice filling every slither of Richie’s entire self. He’s forced to look up at it as it descends from the ceiling to mere inches above him; it’s blank, faceless, a body shaped black hole. Despite its proximity he still can't work it out. Richie has to look and cannot scream as it inclines its spindly hands forth. He cannot flinch as the hand reaches his cheek. He can do nothing but let its fingers find his eyes, and as it pinches his pupils, as it turns his eyes inside out, it tells him once more:

__

"You have to look at me first."

__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to Sorch, the apostrophe queen, for checking this over; Ash, for the consistent encouragement; and Lynn & Jaeden, for proof-reading and allowing me to attempt to scare them with rough drafts and shoddy home made horror.  



	5. The Complication of a Man Behind a Cracked Screen (pt.5)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **TW: SELF HARM **(of sorts, vague, I will write notes at the end of the chapter)  

> 
> Things will get better, I promise.

There's nothing there when the gasp into consciousness heaves his body to an upright position. Nothing above him, nothing in the corner of the room. The roaring silence that had created itself as accompaniment to that haunting, spectral voice, has filled with sirens, and traffic, and distant birdsong, and Graham's gentle growling. The gasp pumped his lungs so harsh they should have burst, but instead, they deflate with a laborious, shaky pace and he does his best to still his shivering frame. He's drenched in cold sweat, tangled in equally soaked sheets, and the churning in his stomach strangely beckons relief - this time, he can move, and he's not cruelly anchored to endure the turbulent voyage that his drunken vision had washed across his darkened room last night. This time, he can move, can use his arms, so he fumbles for his glasses on the nightstand and grants his eyes their aid. His subterranean mind now dug up and attempting to function, aches and begs to be buried again. But Richie ignores it, passes control to his limbs, and his feet find the carpet while he blinks into the morning sun that steadily filters in. Driven to exit the place of his nightmares, he takes himself out for coffee. But even as he walks through a gently bustling Lakeview, and even as he finds a window seat in his favourite coffee shop, and they've got his favourite beans stocked right up, and they're playing that awesome Cambodian Soul album, his mind finds the nightmares figure, its voice, its memory, in every little thing. 

It had taken his eyes, the phantom in his dreams, picked them apart with shadowy fingernails and reassembled them in his empty sockets. It had repeated itself, over and over, had echoed, its voice like a computerised abyss. Richie had filled with its emptiness, involuntarily, and felt himself begin to rot in the vacancy of its presence. No crows bellowed potents, no black cats pawed across his path. No other omens, just the bleeding dark and the apparitions harrowing soliloquy, which he was forced to listen to while it clawed away at his other senses. 

The rest of the dream has clouded over - the warning was clear, but the lessons less than bright in the darkness that the spectre demanded. Richie winces as he recalls the horror, reimagines the robbery of his eyes, and recaps the believable sensation of how they'd been sewn back together and slotted back in place. Only, if he remembers right, the thing had reinstalled his eyes backwards, and Richie had been coerced into looking inside his own head - physically. All he saw, at least, all he recollects of the forced perspective, was a descending smog around a decrepit arcade game. He was sure he heard a different voice, a humans voice. A young voice, sheathed in venomous anger, spitting Richies name. But it's so distant in his memory, so masked by his fear and waking disconcertion that it sinks, a soft white fading smudge in a black body of water; down, down, down - until it's gone. 

It wasn't the first nightmare he'd had, and he knows it would not be the last.

A sugarcube drowns in his coffee cup, and like the memory, dissolves before his very eyes. He can feel the remnants of that nighttime vision floating around his skull, but unlike the sweetened coffee tinting his taste buds, there’s nothing sweet in their particles. Richie sighs into the cup just as his phone rings.

He begrudgingly raises it to his ear.

“Hey, Fred.”

On the other end of the phone, his manager breathes out with something Richie can’t place - nerves? Relief, maybe?

“Wow, you answered fast for once.”

“I had my phone in my hand.”

“Am I interrupting something?”

Richie mimics the elongated breath he’d just heard through the speaker, glances around him as though he’s gauging whether anybody in earshot would be offended by what he’s about to say. It isn’t that - being inappropriate is second nature to him. Really, it’s because Fred has set him up to deliver a joke that he can’t be bothered to deliver.

“Kinda. I’m 98 minutes in to a 105 minute creampie compilation so you’ve sort of caught me at delicate point, if I’m being honest.”

Despite his dry delivery that denotes unenthusiasm beyond repair, Fred’s laughing.

“Jesus, 105 minutes!?” he wheezes.

“Yeah. I’ll be shocked if I have a dick left after this. Maybe I should send the poor guy off on a spa retreat. Give him some space.”

“Him?”

Richie lifts his shoulders to his ears and speaks with his ‘Cockney Copper’ voice. “My dick. Roger the Todger.”

Fred only manages to repeat the ‘R’ of Roger before he’s breathless with laughter. Richie smiles, mouth hot from his coffee cup, chest warmed by his friends giggling. It feels almost like it used to, if only fleeting, back before Richie hit the big time. They make a little small talk, they get the discussion about the New York shows over and done with, and then Fred asks: “are you free tonight?”

Richie stiffens. His coffee is suddenly too hot.

"I've got to see a bloke about a ball game on Hookey Street." He says, with some weird, garbled panic.

"What?" Fred rightly asks.

"Nothing. Sorry. My mind- I've been watching lots of Only Fools and Horses." He nearly said it; his mind is truly elsewhere. And it isn't a complete lie - he has been watching lots of Only Fools and Horses, it's just not the reason why he's lost his head.

Fred doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, of course. Richie can tell by the way his voice speeds up, how it seems to twist up an octave; he's stripped down, vulnerable, eagerly waiting for an acceptance to whatever he'd planned to ask Richie to do with him tonight. If he gets the chance.

Eventually, Richie drops the act: "yeah, I'm free. What did you have in mind?"

"I just thought it'd be cool if we got a few drinks or something?" He's levelled out his tone, but Richies stomach coils in response, the premise of socialising outside the comfort of his apartment summoning neurosis. But still, he agrees, quickly. His mouth spills acceptance without permission, for it's his senses that remind him that his apartment is no longer a place for comfort. His ears, that heard its haunting voice, his skin that felt its icy breath, his eyes that were dissected and forced to watch. His mind makes the effort to not let the nightmare spoil his solitary sanctuary, but the effort's out of malice. His cruel brain has stipulated a contract with his body over time; ignore your senses, overlook your discomfort, and endure everything thrown your way, no matter how painful it is. And he would do that tonight. Return to the bed that chained him, stare into the darkness that conjured that horrific apparition. He'd put himself through it again and again, chastising himself for his fear, continuing to return to a place that no longer harboured comfort, but manifested distress. But he doesn't have to, not tonight; his tongue beat his brain to it, and snatched up Fred's helping hand before he had a moment to register the wrench that tightened all the bolts in his constantly buzzing head.

They discuss the plan briefly. Fred would pick Richie up at 8, they'd drive to Wicker Park, and there'd be a reservation at The Violet Hour, a weird little cocktail bar Fred thought Richie would love.

"It's like a speakeasy," he tells him as Richie finishes up the last of his coffee, slips a ten dollar note in the tip jar and steps out onto an awakening street. "It's got a really cool vibe. You'll love it."

"You say vibe now? Like the kids these days?" Richie says pedantically.

Fred scoffs. "Vibe isn't a word that belongs to the kids, Rich. You're just an out of touch old man."

It was true.

* * *

On his way back up to his apartment, Richie stops to speak to his downstairs neighbour, Pamela. She's a rich lady, the kind with a perfect haircut and always swathed in cashmere no matter the weather. Her kind face is plump, middle aged wrinkles around her bright blue eyes smoothed out by Collagen, and Richie's always been fascinated by the way she always smells like she's come straight from a spa. Like she bathes in gallons of Chanel perfume, and how she can afford to - and he ponders on this as though she exists in some other bracket of luxurious living unattainable to him, when really, he could do the same, if he wanted to.

"Morning, Richie, love." She says with her delightful voice in it's well spoken lilt. She's an English lady who's lived in Chicago for twenty years or so, and with the duration, her accent has been tainted with an American twang. Her aura is so lovely that Richie can never help but feel his spirits lift, if only a little.

"Hey Pam, I was wondering if you'd mind having Graham tonight? I'm out, and I don't want to leave him on his own."

Her husband works away most of the time, and so she's always thrilled when Richie calls in such a favour. If he was a touch more observant, he'd deduce that she was just as desperately lonely as him. So she agrees gleefully, and Richie tells her he'd drop Graham off around 7.

As he turns from her door, she halts him with a gentle grip of perfectly manicured fingers and diamond rings.

He freezes, her touch is heavy on his elbow, even though it isn't. She said it so softly, with such an underlying concern that there was no way to misinterpret it. And yet, he's afraid to turn around, in case her kind eyes have melted into something more devious, and her glossy lips hold a more suggestive crinkle in their corner.

Strained seconds pass, and it takes so much swallowing of this undetectable anxiety for him to turn, and when he does, his face has collapsed into his worry. He didn't know what he was expecting to see, why he took her words so incorrectly. She's got such a look on her face, and it's anything but what his callous imagination had tricked him to expect. His turn to her ends in an embrace. She steps across the threshold and pulls him into her, her hand cupping the crown of his head like he's a newborn, like she's his mother. Her warmth conjures guilt to creep up his throat like bile. Yet another person he'd been wrong about.

"I heard you screaming in the night," she says softly, her fingers curling into the tufts of hair around his ears. She's trying to sooth the way his shoulders go so rigid. "I knew it was you because I heard Graham barking, too. I waited until you stopped - five minutes or so - and I called the doorman. He checked the surveillance and there was nothing out of the ordinary so, I assumed you were having a bad dream."

Richie nods and thinks she's irritatingly wise.

"My son used to get night terrors, too," She adds wistfully, and lets him go, stepping back to wrap her shawl back around her shoulders. "But I was always there to wake him up with a cuddle." She says that sadly, her expression matches, paints pity on plump cheeks.

"I have Graham." Richie states, with a touch of humour, and a hint of bluntness.

Pamela smiles. "You have Graham." 

He knows she meant well, but Richie walks away with the harsh reminder of his loneliness circling the sections of hair behind his ear that Pamela had caressed, and the overwhelming dread and embarrassment of being heard, howling, in the terror of his ever empty nights. 

* * *

>   
**new message from Eddie Kaspbrak: **did you pass out last night or what?  


Richie blinks at the message, a crease formed above the bridge of his glasses. He doesn't remember talking to Eddie last night, but he doesn't remember much at all from his fourth whiskey to the waking nightmare. With trepidation, he unlocks his phone and reads back on the night he mostly lost.  
It starts from 8pm, and Eddie messages first.

>   
E: you seen the netflix special he did recently?  
R: yeah have you?  
E: yeah it was shit  
R: agreed  
R: but why do you watch his stuff if you hate him so much??  
E: dunno  
E: why do you?  
R: same. but I guess in some weird way it gives me something to laugh at. not because he's funny but because he's especially not funny  
E: I totally get that. it gives me something to channel my anger into  
R: sure thing. Richie Tozier can get fucked  
E: not by me  
R: you sure? you spend enough time locked away with him by the sounds of it  
E: like I said. I'm married dude.  
R: it would be an angry fuck  
E: married  
R: it might make him funnier?  
E: wife.  
R: so you keep saying but I'm beginning to think your wife's name might be Richie Tozier  
E: how fucking dare you disrespect my woman like that  


It goes on, Richie keeps scrolling and upon his lips rests an absentminded smile. The timestamps now show 10:24pm, and he can't summarise how it feels, knowing he'd texted with this guy continuously for over two hours. A cocktail of things; his chest is a gloriously warm pool in which his heart floats blissfully, his cheeks hot and round, aching with the persistence of his smile. But there's shame, too. It tips a bucket of ice in his chest, and its fiendish accomplice is the confusion that drives the ache of his cheeks further, up to his temples, and deeper within until his whole head hurts. But he keeps scrolling; it's all he has right now.

>   
R: hey did you remember to deadbolt the door? don't want your wife interrupting your scheduled twitter troll session  
E: no risk of that I can hear her snoring in her easy chair  
R: holy shit, you take it that seriously that you have to drug her??  
E: I slip zolpidem into her TV dinner  
R: I'm calling the cops  
E: noooo don't do it  
[five minutes later]  
E: you there??  
R: what's your address?  
E: I ain't giving anything up that easy, punk!  


Their conversation seemed to dip in and out of reminiscent bickering, and reading in sobriety now, Richie finds himself giggling and marvelling at just how quick whittled the other man it. He probably harboured the same sentiments in the moment.

He scrolls further, to 10:48pm, and - oh.

>   
R: you're fucking hilarious man  
E: aw no it's just pent up dissatisfaction filtering out of my tiny old man muscles  
R: no for real you're killer  
E: stop I'm blushing  
R: I mean  
R: I mean this in the least lame way possible but you seem like a cool guy  
R: and I'm glad I slid into your dms. as the kids these days say  
E: there's no possible way that's anything BUT lame bro  
R: yeah I know. I'm a big lame baby, shoot me  
E: are you suggesting a duel?  
R: name a time and a place and I'll be there with my best cowboy hat and friendly pistol  
E: grand canyon, Saturday at sundown  
R: YEEHAW (1234)  
E: oh it's on buddy  


And that's where it ends. Richie gazes at the last message of the night, and the first message of the day, and a slow sigh greets the air from behind his teeth. He drops his phone onto the seat beside him on the sofa and he stares at the azure sky through the smeared windows. Too big, too bright, too blue. But he stares until the sky has stamped it's clarity on his iris', and they glisten with crystalline tears. He doesn't know why.

And then, without thinking too much into it, his thumbs tapping on their own accord, he types a tortuous question into a search engine:

_'Can you fall for someone over text.'_

He's not sure if he likes the answers or not.

* * *

It's 7:20pm and he's stood in front of his bathroom mirror. He's picked out the normal attire; short sleeve shirt over a black t-shirt, black jeans, leather jacket. It's a candy striped shirt, pale pink and emerald green. He looks fine, he looks comfortable. He looks like himself, he thinks, except as he grazes his sight across the other parts of himself, the parts not clad in patterns or colours, he's given reason to believe that he doesn't look like himself at all. The fluorescent lights are harsh on his pale complexion, washing him out, dulling his features significantly next to the stripes smothering his chest. Shadows beneath his eyes make the pools of blue within them look so far away that if he dived into them, he'd break his bones as he hit the water. He leans forward, sighs, touches his hollow cheeks and tells himself it's just because he hasn't eaten right in a few days. The shading of his jaw begs to be shaved and as he rubs his fingers across it, it prickles and stings his ears with the unpleasant noise. He's frowning, disturbed by the sight of his own image, and if he were to write a list of everything he hates about his appearance right now, the list would reach the ground of his apartment building. 15 floors. His hands lift, trailing fingers up his rough skin, his sharp cheekbones, and find his hairline. Receding, he notices, as if it's been an overnight change. His trembling digits skim through the wiry strands and stop dead at the root of his parting. A silver hair. He scoffs at first, thinks of the jokes he can crack about his evident aging in next weeks shows. But the comedy wears thin quickly, dissipates as soon as he finds another grey. And then another. A cluster of them, right in the roots, and he'd never noticed until now. Compelled by strange panic or by some sort of belligerence against Father Time, he plucks the first one out with his fingernails. He yanks another, and then another, and as his fingers rake over his scalp and more silver strands are discovered, the more hungry they become. They secure tufts of greys by the root and pull like there's no pain involved at all, and they pull until it's not Richie commanding their actions anymore, but an automatic function. He doesn't register the sting until he's rocked out of his trance by an almighty series of thuds. All at once, he feels the self inflicted pain on his scalp and hisses, recoils from the mirror and stumbles from the bathroom to the hallway where the thumping sounds. It's the door, for fucks sake, there's someone at the door. 

He swings it open, bemused and looking like he'd just been reanimated by Dr Frankenstein. On the other side, both drained of colour and with mouths agape, stand Fred and Pamela. There's a silence so tense it could be balled up and thrown out the window with that list of Richie's imperfections.

Pamela speaks first. It's soft and wrought with concern; "Richie, love, what happened?"

"Nothing. Nothing, I- uh, what's the time?"

"8:15." Fred answers bluntly. "I was buzzing up for ten minutes-"

"-and he buzzed me and I said I thought it was strange because you were supposed to be dropping Graham off with me at 7."

"Did you forget, Rich?"

Richie blinks - he looks utterly stunned.

"No. I didn't forget. I just lost track of time." He says sheepishly, and he's not sure if that's true.

Pamela looks heartbroken, her glistening blue eyes swimming sadly in their fixation upon the tragic man before her. Fred just looks stunned, a near carbon copy of Richie's own expression.

"What happened to your hair?" Fred asks at last, the million dollar question, but he asks it as casually as if he was asking about the weather. It's just that Richie doesn't know how to answer. All he can do is rigidly lift his hand up to his head and stroke over where his fingers had attacked.

"Is it bad?" He croaks, and Pamela barges in, slips an arm around his waist.

"I've seen much worse, love, trust me. Let's have a look at it, shall we?" And she leads him off to the bathroom, leaving a flabbergasted Fred to close the door behind them, and wonder what the hell is going on.

He'd pry later after whisky and cigars, but little does he know that Richie, himself, is none the wiser.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so a little explaining to do. first off, [Hookey Street.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3Kkvwyyf2c)  
I like to think Richie likes to delve into all manner of legendary comedic television, and so this is a British treasure I felt like mentioning. You must forgive me for feeling the need to through in British references here and there...  
The coffee shop he's in is Osmium in Lakeview (which is where is lives)  
The cocktail bar, Violet Hour, exists and is fabulous, but that's for the next chapter.  
["Yeehaw 1234"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUTqW32gx9k) is probably my favourite Simpsons quote
> 
> Ok, on to the tough stuff.  
I wasn't sure whether to tag this as self harm or not, as technically, it isn't. In honour of World Mental Health Day, I opened up to my personal instagram followers about my own struggles with anxiety, depression, and in particular, Excoriation Disorder, which is a body-focused repetitive behaviour. It effects me all the time, but in particular, when I'm struggling with low moods and anxiety. I get 'trapped in my reflection', picking at things that don't exist and making my skin bleed and scar. With Richie and his grey hairs, it's symbolic of his pain in ageing, and his loss in identity (having not noticed them before). 
> 
> This fic is obviously a tricky topic, but I'm aiming to write it as sympathetically as possible.


	6. The Complication of a Man Behind a Cracked Screen (pt.6)

There are two things, in this short space of time in which he has existed in his pocket, that Richie has determined about the mysterious Eddie Kaspbrak. Whether he is correct about his theories or not may not ever be confirmed, however with the way the man bleeds from blue screen to the green veins pumping Richie's heart, a little speculation seems utterly natural. And, who's to say, perhaps his curiosity might one day be rewarded.

The first of those two things is that Eddie is enjoying talking to Richie as much as Richie is enjoying talking to Eddie. That's a good revelation, convenient, but it simultaneously plasters a layer of apprehension around the strange, beating thing behind his ribs. Richie enjoys talking to Eddie, a fully formed human with a social media account, but Eddie doesn't have the luxury of pairing a face with the handle, or knowing the name behind the username. All Eddie knows is that he's idly chatting away with a 40-year-old dog owner with a shared (false) disdain of a public figure. It riddles Richie with perturbation when he thinks about how Eddie might react should he discover his Twitter ‘friend’s’ true identity. But he won't, he reassures himself only to combat the reassurance disparagingly; _don't you want him to? If you don't, what's the point?_

This first thing brings both delight and confusion in a tumultuous rising tide. The second thing, though confusing, yet somewhat heart wrenching, brings a curious comfort that only sends Richie into some deeper whirlpool of self-loathing. Eddie is just as miserable with his life as Richie is with his own. Why else would he dedicate so much time to slandering a comedian over social media, and in doing so, build such a following? Why else would he be so inclined to befriend someone anonymous, and in doing so, reveal snippets of resentment for the woman he’d married? It makes more sense than anything else Richie has pondered, and it’s certainly more believable that Eddie would revert to the internet and an unknown confidant as a means of escapism, than the idea of the two men unearthing a connection through cyberspace, and hence relishing in each other’s inboxes to strengthen it. No, the latter was impossible… Wasn’t it? 

He thinks these two predetermined facts through while his neighbours fingers rake over his scalp and cut his hair, until he's mindlessly compelled to blurt out: "how often do you talk about your husband?"

Pamela’s taken aback, twists an index finger through one of his broken curls, hums in contemplation.

“Whenever I miss him, I suppose.” She answers, and retrains her attention to the mess of his hair.

“How often is that?” Richie asks, coming across more eager than curious.

“Quite a lot. Every day. He works in New York during the week."

“Would you talk about him as much if he was around more?”

“Funny questions, Richie!” Pamela lets out a light chuckle though she doesn’t seem irritated by his poking.

“I know. I’m just wondering. Like - I guess I just want to know - how often do you mention that you’re married?”

She’s slow with her response, like she’s trying to work out what it is he’s asking, as if she has some motherly sixth sense. “Hardly at all,” she finally says, head tilted, warmly serene eyes watching his face. “We’re happy, and we’re healthy. There’s no need to announce my unavailability to other men. But I have friends, you know, that almost unnecessarily interject it into conversation, like it’s something they need to convince themselves of. I’ve always found that the people that insist their unavailability are only doing it to mask their temptation.”

Richie nods, and it gives him some reassurance - his presumptions made from the snippets of Eddie’s life that he’s been fed are not too far fetched, and that lessens the beatings on himself. He’s glad, at least, that Eddie cannot speculate about Richie, glad that no personal information has been slipped, and his anonymity has been maintained. Eddie only has the opportunity to berate the cardboard cutout version of Richie Tozier, and Richie intends on keeping it that way.

If Eddie could see him now, all sunken eyed and hair on end like some mad professor, his skill of ridiculing Richie would be so fueled that he’d surely take to Twitter and in a flash, be summoning thousands of followers to join in the laughter. 

"I look like-" Richie starts.

Pamela interrupts. "-a baby bird?"

Richies lips fold into a timid line, a smile of sorts, and he looks at Pamela in the mirror as she gently fusses with his damaged hair. She's riddled with worry; it hunches her shoulders, creates an unwelcome wrinkle on the botox smooth skin between her brows. Naturally, he feels guilty for that, for rousing symptoms of unpleasant concern that's neither wanted nor warranted. She might have sensed the guilt he harbours, for with a snap her eyes are on him, and they share the glass of the mirror between them.

"When did you last call your mum?" She asks, and Richie believes it's out of the blue, so frowns.

"I don't know. Couple months ago, maybe?"

She doesn't say anything at first, a neat purse of cerise lips changes her expression from concern to disapproval. Richie watches her and feels her lessons twist through the air and plant between his shoulder blades. She doesn't need to say anything at all, and yet, she does.

"Give her a call, Richie. It’s not my place to say, but I’d want to hear from you, if I were her.”

Richie looks at her, sad wrinkles and stubble. “It is your place,” he tells her softly. “I’ll call her.”

Pam only smiles at that, for she’s finished with that ruined mop of his.

“Very smart.” she coos, and Richie finds he can look at himself now without a grimace.

“Very smart.” he repeats.

* * *

You can't move fast in Chicago, can't release into open roads; there's always a red light, a pedestrian, a queue of traffic. It’s a congested and slow moving, fast paced town, a place that moves symbiotically at two juxtaposing speeds. It’s the perfect personification of Richie and the world, which burns rubber around him and speeds off, leaving him to walk the racetracks of life on foot. Chicago works for him. He can’t keep up with it, so he doesn’t try. Just sits in traffic and lets it all happen around him. 

The bar Fred’s bought him to, at least, offers some guise of separation from the chaos of the city, barriered by a hidden door, a dark corridor, and a thick velvet curtain. The atmosphere and the aesthetic, of course, aids the escapism, but it’s what they’re serving that’ll loosen the tightened bolts of his brain. The drinks come with obscure titles and are so complex that one couldn’t possibly select without assistance, and the eccentric host gives descriptions such as “like eating a punnet of strawberries and then taking a bite out of a tree”, and “like brushing your teeth on a mountain, and then spitting over the edge”. Richie wants to taste them all, and Fred’s buying, so he might just try. 

They sit across from one another, sunk into navy velvet tub chairs with six foot tall backs. Neither speak. Freds dark eyes are on Richie with some stiff expression Richie can’t place. It’s not an awkward air, in fact, it’s quite comfortable, but the anticipation of who will shatter the quiet first mounts up as too much for Richie to deal with. So he flees for protection, and takes out his phone.

> R to E: yeah i passed out last night and i’m likely to repeat myself tonight.  
With it he sends a picture of the table, aligned with regimental cocktails ready for service. Little to Richies surprise (something he ought tame, for Eddies habit of instant replies is heightening Richies hopes and, undoubtedly, setting him up for an eventual fall), his phone buzzes back.  
E: you’re a mess. don’t pass out. Are you alone? Because if you get drunk and pass out and throw up in your sleep you could choke on it. It’s how jimi hendrix died you know  
R: ok mom i won’t  
E: you’ll thank me for this! Statistically speaking it’s a very common way to die  
R: choking? Yeah i know. It was so sad when your mom died choking on my dick  
E: what the fuck shut up man

“You didn’t read the rules.”

It’s Freds voice that brings him back out of the garish and near imprisoning light of his phone. Richie looks up sluggishly, the remnants of silent laughter fading on his mouth,

“Rules?” He asks, and remembering he has alcohol to get through, takes a brave sip of Cognac and Angostura Bitters with a wince and a hiss.

“Yeah. No baseball hats, no phones, emphasis on the no phones thing.”

“Oh.” Richie does as he’s told under the heavy browed stare of his manager - or is he his friend tonight? - and locks Eddie away.

The silence lapses again.

They sit, and they stew in it, and then they order more drinks.

It’s Richie that breaks their stubborn quietude.  
“That guy weirdly nails it every time with his descriptions of the drinks,” he sips a new taste and pulls a twisted face triggered by sourness. “Like licking a lemon and chewing tobacco. Exactly.” Fred laughs. Richie’s pleased. “I can’t say I know what marshmallows roasting on a bonfire made from liquorice tastes like exactly, but I’m sure he’s on the mark with it.” The conversation moves in ebbs and flows, familiar, and comfortable, and predictable. Predictable to the extent that Richie continues to reach for the device in his pocket that he’s not permitted to use, and every time, Fred raises a telling brow and ruins it. It seems that the more they drink, the closer they draw to an intimidating fork in the road, and Richie knows that Fred’s more likely to take the path with shadowy trees and crushing fog than he is the path with clapping seals and dick jokes. Richie sits there in that high backed chair, while his phone burns radiation into his thigh, while whatever spirit lurks in the swirling liquid of his tumbler stings his taste buds. But the path isn’t taken. Instead, the bill is settled up, and the two men leave.

Of course, Fred was just intending on taking him on that route on the way back home. They’re under canopies of summer touched trees, and beneath their feet the pavement echoes, a deserted stretch ahead. 

“I wish you’d let me worry about you.” Fred sighs, a proclamation to unenthusiastic ears, and answered by slurring lethargy from Richie. “What? What do you mean I don’t let you?” “You shut me out.” “I shut everyone out.” “Which is why I worry! You’ve made yourself so alone. I’m the only person you have some history with and I’m not even permitted to care about you. Why? Because I’m your manager?” Freds voice is sharp with emotion, while Richies is apathetic, an advertisement of his inner workings. “Thanks for reminding me.” He says with nothing, and with everything, Fred snaps back. “Answer my question!” He’s halted his step, paused and slowly swivelling, a head shorter than Richie and hunched with frustration which only makes him look smaller. Richie is obligated to stop too, but he holds himself different to Fred. Straighter, impatient. “I don’t know what to tell you, Fred,” he says whilst looking to the sky. “It’s not you, it’s me?” “Fuck you.” Fred bites back. Richies eyes fall to the other man now, unblinking, his mouth falling open and shaking shut as if stuck in a loop. “Fuck you, Richie,” Fred repeats, his stance a rigid line, a stiff and unwavering wedge in Richies way. “I’m watching you break, I’m witnessing you fucking dissolving into some sort of...I don’t know...weird husk of who you are. I’m seeing it happen, you’re making me watch and you’re scaring me. You’re fucking scaring me, Rich.” He takes a breath, pinches the skin between his eyebrows with his index and his thumb. “I extend chance after chance, olive branch after olive branch. I want nothing from you, but you’re not giving me nothing. You’re giving me fucking palpitations, and I’ll tell you this: I’m fucking done worrying about you, if you’re not even going to acknowledge that I worry about you in the first place.” He’s done, Richie thinks, and he looks Fred over like he’s the broken one. It hurts that he’s right. It hurts so fucking much. He breathes into air that’s far too cold for July.  
“I’m not going to do anything stupid, Fred.” Richie mutters, and makes so much effort to say anything at all. Fred nods stiffly, his head bowed. “I don’t want you to talk to me, if you don’t want to,” he says, near whispering, lips quivering and eyes braving a glance up at Richies. “I don’t want you to tell me how you’re feeling, if you can’t. Rich, I just want you to pick up the phone to me.”

_Ok, _Richie thinks, _I can do that for him._ It’s not much to ask, it isn’t a huge step forward. All he needs to do to put Freds mind at rest is pick up the phone to him, nothing else, and yet, he takes another step of is own, unpredictable accord. A short stride and a duck of his head is all it took for Richie to kiss him, chaste and tasting of drunken desperation. Brief and clumsy, but returned. There isn’t time to think it through, there isn’t a moment within the capture of lips to even register whether it was a good kiss or not, but where it lacked so much, it made up for in sentiment. They pull away. Fred is staring at his feet, Richie is staring at Fred, and it’s clear the night has ended. “You didn’t need to do that.” Fred croaks. “I think I did.” Richie replies, voice so tentative it could slip between the cracks in the pavement and only the worms would know that in this moment, his mouth means everything that comes out of it. “Why?” He’s nervous, and Richie’s got a sloppy grin lathered across his clumsy lips. “You wanted me to.” Richie doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body. Not really. But the way he speaks those words, so uncaring, without any hint of teasing or joking, can only be interpreted as the way they spilled. Foolishly malicious, and Fred looks wounded. He says nothing, steps back and bites his lip. A car rolls up to the curb behind Richie, and Freds stoney face changes for a moment to relief. “Your Uber.” Fred says with a flamboyant embellishment of his arm, before turning abruptly and strutting away. “See you in New York, asshole.”

In the car, Richies head lulls this way and that and he can’t make sense of anything.  
Tomorrow, sobriety would come with headaches and regret. His mouth has condemned him to contrition already, and his drunken fingers add to his mistakes.

> R to E: i don’t know what it is about you but i want to know it all  
R: i think about you all the time  
R: i know this is weird and i’m not ok with it but at the same time it’s wonderful. Waking up with someone on your mind.  
R: i just wish it wasn’t you. Everything would be so much easier if it wasn’t you and if i was someone else. someone better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to di who was my beta reader for this chapter.
> 
> So I have a lot of thoughts on this. In the last chapter, my friend Ruve (in some kind of panic, bless) asked me if Maggie is dead, as I told her that Pamela was like a mother figure to Richie. Maggie is not dead, lol. The point of these secondary characters are to show that Richie has people close to him that love and care for him, but he’s constantly misinterpreting them and not treating them very nicely.


	7. The Complication of a Man Behind a Cracked Screen (pt.7)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for my shit attempt at a stand up comedy routine.  
actual TW for that routine being pretty crude and sexist. I'm sorry.  


It's funny how quick milk turns sour, strange how soon it curdles in hot water and, like the unavoidable use-by date stamped on the cartons side, expires in use as the clock ticks around. Richie turns down the coffee offered to him by his assistant, Sophie, she pulls a face, something close to concern, and asks him if there's anything else he needs.  


"Maybe a bourbon." He says stiffly to himself in the mirror, and in the room outside the glass, she stalls.

"Before the show?" Richie can tell she doesn't want to question him. He looks at her, the eyes of his reflection meeting hers in the physical world.

"Fred told you to keep me from the drink, didn't he." His eyebrow is raised but his mouth falls in the opposite direction. She looks timid in the corner of the room, like that overused image of a rabbit caught in headlights, and utters confirmation of his restriction from alcohol as ordered by his managerial overlord. Richie sighs, palms land flat on the dressing table surface. His phone sits dormant an inch or two from his hand and his pinky finger, almost cautiously, edges to touch it's side, hoping to feel a vibration but getting nothing but cold steel and cracked glass. He’s kidding himself anyway - the person he’s hoping to hear from is gone. It was Richie’s own fault, and he looked back at his direct messages with a sober head that following morning and felt guilt and regret wind bony fingers around his scalp and hold his hair back as he wretched into the toilet bowl. Both sickly feelings had an obesquious attentiveness, it had to be said, but they held him greedily, posessively, and asserted themselves as permanent fixtures. They ensured he continued to torture himself long into the day, for the whole weekend, even, by re-reading an expired conversation, by holding his phone where he could feel it at all times, by clicking the lock-screen button just to check for a notification that would never come. Even now, the weekend cleared and in the past, and the present being a potentially pinnacle point in his career, he cannot resist but to torment himself. Nothing changes.

**"You can no longer send Direct Messages to this person."**   


_Way to twist the knife, my tenderly kept Twitter troll._

"Are you sure I can't get you a coffee?" Sophie's voice shatters the hall of mirrors. He turns, arm falling over the back of his chair, and the only glass between their eye contact now is the set of lenses that turn the world high definition. The room has a blur, however, a visual distortion like a rain smattered window. Perhaps, sobriety can be just as delusion inducing as it's booze fueled counterpart. He can’t blame her for sticking to the rules - he knows all too well what a jobsworth Fred can be. He's here thinking he could bend the arm of a man that once drove 50 miles to collect a receipt from a McDonald's for a minute maid slushie, because he keeps receipts for everything. The man in mind is the one that Richie has witnessed making drinks with meticulous measures of alcohol and working out the ratio of alcohol to ice and then weighing the ice. Once, while at Fred's, Richie (under the pledge of dry January) slipped a clandestine shot of vodka into his lemonade, only to receive a never-ending hounding from Fred, who had measured each bottle of his alcohol cabinet's content with a tape measure. Nothing slips past him; the man keeps a right reign on every snippet of his life, and Richie's for that matter. Except, of late, his control over Richie's care has fallen to the wayside, and with his precision in mind, Richie can't imagine how off balance that must be throwing him. Because, despite the pedantic nature of his fussing, Richie has to admit that Fred always has his best interest at heart. In enters that bone rattling guilt again that, in many ways, never left, instead sits curiously upon Richie's shoulder in silence until it becomes appropriate to peel away a rib and severe one of the chords holding his heart in place, causing it to plummet and remind him of everything he is to blame. It’s only a matter of time before the last chord is cut. 

"An Irish coffee?" Richie says desperately, like the guilt weighs nothing. For a moment, Sophie looks like she might break, her fear encompassed disks of blue defrosting, but then Fred enters the room and she freezes once more.

He's in the doorway, sharply dressed, dark eyes shadowed and deepening his sockets and a thin line in place of lips. Richie can feel him; not in the literal sense but, maybe worse. 

He feels sharp. Sophie shoots a look at Richie and squeaks "I'll get you that coffee," and scurries away, taking all the life in the room with her.

Fred stares with such a dark and vicious torrent that Richie can’t swim against it, so gets sucked in, and sinks into discomfort. Eventually, words bite against his tongue and he stutters: “why are you mothering me?” 

Nothing is returned at first, no scoff, much to Richie’s expectations. When it eventually comes, it’s as bitter as the Angostura that Fred had purchased and Richie had drank, just days before.

“Are you fucking kidding me? You think I’m mothering you?”

“Well, yeah,” Richie’s cumbersome, a half dead pet that Fred has only just given the gift of speech to. “I think it is. Banning me from alcohol like I’m some sort of drunk. Do you know how embarrassing that was just now?”

“Well, welcome to my world.”

Fred is standing back, a more casual pose than his riled up tone would normally be delivered with. He’s got his hands in his pockets, his lips a lopsided pout, and he’s on the other end scale of what Richie looks like right now. A giant, dishevelled, irked, the opposite of his manager’s pristine appearance. He delays his reply, he blinks with laboured effort.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Fred shifts, swapping the weight of his balance from one leg to the other - his painted face is melting.

“You really want to do this now?” He sighs.

Richie says nothing, just beckons for consistency in Fred’s statement.

“I don’t, but if I must-” Fred starts to move, the early stages of a rampant pace (a restless habit of his), and if he hadn’t caught onto the brewing disaster demolishing Fred’s stoic professionalism already, Richie most certainly would feel it now.

“The other night, Rich, I talked to you as a friend. Right now, I’m your manager and as a representative of you, of your image, I’m telling you that it is absolutely fucking mortifying having to defend your reputation when there’s scarecely anything at this point to defend. You fell off the waggon a while ago- fine. But you didn’t ever make any attempt to chase after it, you just fucking rolled over and wallowed in the mud like a-”

“-like a ‘lil piggy.” He doesn’t know where it came from, but Richie’s mouth takes a familiar old route without his navigational say so. He pours a little lighthearted humour on Fred’s rapacious rant and watches the fire simmer to a hiss.

Fred manages, even, to smile. “You are a pig, Richie. But you don’t need me to tell you that.” He says.

“Nope,” Richie concurs, “You want a bacon sandwich? My ass meat is spectacularly delicious.”

“Hideous.”

“Well look, if I’m no longer profitable, just take me down the market and sell my flesh to the butchers.”

“Don’t take it too far.”

“Fresh comedian pork belly. A little dry, maybe, but the aftertaste of shame and years of repression really gives it a unique, somewhat herbaceous kick.”

“Please stop-”

“Like taking a handful of nuts at the bar, knowing they’re doused in piss and shit, but you just can’t resist a poo-nut so you demolish a whole bowl and wash it down with five cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and-”

“You sound like a less classy version of that guy from the bar.”

“That’s what I was going for.”

“Right,” Fred shuffles, blinks away residual laughter he’d hated to release at the, frankly terrible, comedic spiel from Richie. “I guess that’s where your memories of that night start and finish, right?”

For the first time, Richie is sheepish. For the first time, both men mirror each other in their timid postures.

“Yeah, I don’t remember that much but I know that… I know that I fucked up.”

He isn’t referring to the encounter with Eddie; that he had evidence for, and this was purely gut wrenching instinct. There had been that taste in his mouth on Saturday morning; sour, impossible to wash out, and blackened by tobacco. He could see it on his breath, a tar like smog, and it left inky residue around the rim of each glass his dry lips had desperately pursed. Richie had quit smoking three years ago after a revelation far too late in his life that dubbed the habit, simply put, bad for you. For as long as he could remember, he smoked, so relinquished blame over the addiction. If he can’t remember when or where it started, then how can he judge the origin? It had taken some severe nagging from the clean cut Fred to get him off the cigs, and he always did say Richie would thank him, but trying to kick the habit was akin to torture. Instead of the inveterate placement of a cigarette between his lips, he swapped it out for a lollipop (and, naturally, three nicotine patches). It doesn’t take someone with the keenest dentistry knowledge to understand the risks of sucking on 15 lollipops a day, but apparently, common sense slips the mind of a smoker stripped of smokes. He ended up with an abscess, the kind that flooded his entire head with pain and doomed him to zombified staggering about until someone (Fred, who else?) took him to get it sorted. He had to have a root canal, and after the treatment, was just a little too shaken by the idea of holding anything cigarette or lollipop shaped between his teeth. It’s now a measure of how drunk he gets, how reckless, for if he wakes up in the morning with that stale coating on the roof of his mouth, he knows he’s gotten drunk enough to forget the pain of the root canal.

He’d smoked that night, erased most of the events from his mind, found those messages, but another undiagnosable guilt lurked within his churning stomach.

“You’ve got something prepared for tonight, haven’t you?” Fred changes topic, Richie’s glad.

“Yes,” he lies, “Are we ready to go?”

Fred checks his watch. “Ten minutes.” which means they need to head to the stage. “Hey, Rich - try not to think about the other night too much. There’s nothing to worry about, really.”

Richie’s just about to say something nice, he thinks, but Sophie’s re-entry to the scene knocks him off course.

“Irish coffee!” She beams.

Richie looks at Fred.

Fred looks at Richie.

“You motherfucker.”

* * *

Beside the curtain, Richie breathes out the fumes of whiskey and coffee. He sees the audience bathed in blue spotlights, varying degrees of hilarity rapturing the bobbing of their heads, like a sea caught between a storm and a serene shore. The guy on at the moment, Lester Ronson, has them somewhat bewitched, and he spins a rather outlandish and farfetch'd tale of being placed under citizen's arrest by Shannon Briggs (world heavyweight boxing champion at the time) after Ronson flashed his ballsack at Briggs out the back window of a bus. It gets to the point where Richie can no longer listen, and so, you can guess what he does.

There is a notification, but it’s not from Eddie. Of course it isn’t. It’s from Pamela, a picture of Graham on a pristine white sofa and a message that says “good luck from your biggest fans!”. It makes him smile, but it also takes his mind back to the first night of Graham’s stay with his neighbour. The night Fred had told him not to think about.  
He thinks about it like it’s an act of rebellion, stares into blinding lights until he’s forced to retreat behind closed lids and use only his mind as sigh and as hearing. He remembers parts; Fred going on about wanting to speak to Richie on the phone? Something like that? He remembers being facetious, he remembers an impulsive move that felt wrong against whatever senses he had used for it. He remembers… “Please welcome to the stage, Richie Trashmouth Tozier!” No more time. He takes one last look at his phone, a notification prompting a required operating system update - he swipes it off screen, and lags his steps into the light. He does remember Fred’s parting words from that night, and they echo in around his skull as he finds the mic. 

_See you in New York,_

"Asshole!"

It’s not in his head. Not at all. It came from the crowd, five rows back, the aisle seat. It came from a man, a real life man, in the flesh, on his feet and stanced like a spring coiled up and ready to release.

It comes from Eddie.

Richie becomes pathetic in that moment, a jittering jaw, eyes that blink so much they are windscreen wipers on full speed in torrential rain. But he can see fine. In fact, he can see better than he ever has before. And Eddie is there, and real.

"E-” he croaks the beginnings of his name, the microphone held at his chest, which could easily amplify the furious beating of his heart. But he composes himself, enough to stand there (for his feet are inclined to bolt, his knees are weakened to the point of collapse), and retorts with an even gaze: “Fuckhat."

"Fuck you." Eddie fires back, still stood. The people in the audience around him slide into uncomfortable laughter. Richie doesn’t notice, nor care, but notes that the man is sitting alone. He takes a miniscule beat, fixes his balance, cerements his aim, and shoots.

"No thanks, I'm taking a sabbatical after your mother annihilated me last night."

Laughter erupts, and something of a smirk grazes Richie’s lips. Eddie sits down, and Richie takes that as his queue to continue with his bit, for despite being overwhelmed by the unexpected presence in the audience, he’s ultimately overcome with an excitable energy. Something he can’t ever remember feeling, like he needs to put his tongue on a leash. Almost like he’s a kid again.

“So on the back of that, I am single, but to be honest with you I’m kinda making it my mission to keep it that way. It’s not like I’m condemning myself to whatever the male equivalent of spinsterdom is, it’s just that I have never had a successful relationship, and on a purely rational and analytical basis, I haven’t made any positive changes in my life since I stopped cutting the crusts off my sandwiches, 3 years ago. So I know that any relationship I embark upon is just destined to end disgustingly. And when I say disgustingly, I mean it. The last relationship I was in ended 7 years ago. “ The audience makes a collective ‘aww’. “I know, I know. None of you came here tonight to watch a comedy show, did you? You’re here for the ego boost and that alone! You sadistic motherfuckers! She cheated on me, by the way. For once it wasn’t me that volunteered myself as slut of the century. I know! I know. I remember her coming clean about it-” he giggles “-come clean, oh man. You’ll see why that’s funny. You’ll see... She was crying, she was all snotty, it was gross, and she was pretty much legitimately begging for me to take her back and forgive her. “Pleeeeeeaaaase Richie, please!” and I was like, nah, babe, you stomped on my love guts. “Pleeeeeaaase Richie, I’ll do anything!”” he takes a dramatic pause, and his eyebrow raises “Now I know what you’re thinking here. Well, the ladies are probably thinking ‘ugh what a pig, men are such opportunists’, and the men? blowjob! Blowjob! Blowjob! Am I right? Sure I am. You guys, however, are very very wrong. Because I’m not an opportunist, and she had a set of teeth on her that made my dick shrivel up with fear anytime her mouth went near it. That was way out the window, forget about it. I’ve got a chance card of all chance cards here, she’ll do anything, and you know what I asked her? I asked her to shit on my chest.” He takes a long pause, Richie’s nodding, the audience are laughing somewhat nervously. “It’s true. I told her to shit on my chest. She was, understandably like “why the fuck do you want me to shit on your chest?” and I’ve got to be honest with you, please believe me when I say, I did not want her to shit on my chest. It wasn’t like some deep seeded fetish that I saw a green light for after years of dark web deep dive sock sessions. Not at all. My philosophy was - neither of us want to be in this situation right now where one of us has been cheated on and the other is grovelling like a sockless Dobby, so lets add in another situation that neither of us want to be in, throw a little bit of poop in for good measure, and let both situations cancel each other out! Sidenote and spoiler alert here, you’re starting to see how I have literally no clue as to the ethics of a healthy, successful relationship, right? In a time of romantic crisis, such as this, my mind automatically goes to shit. God forbid I ever forgot an anniversary or valentines day.” The crowd is in pieces, he doesn’t need to say it, but he does. “Hey sweetie, I know you would have ideally wanted chocolates, but I had to improvise…” at this he breaks composure to giggle behind his hand. “So anyway, I told her: “I don’t want you to, but if you’d do anything, you’d do that.” So I’ve got her cornered by her own desperation, guilt, and this shitting fetish that I definitely don’t have, what are you talking about…” “Well, it happened. Might have been a Tuesday, the most romantic of the days. We put on a CD to lighten the mood. I think it was Phil Collins, the one with “In The Air Tonight” on it. Classic. I’ve got some candles lit, thinking I’ll probably run us a bubble bath after the deed is done… And she...actually...did it.” He takes a long pause, as he waits for the audience to lapse into a tired-from-laughing silence. “You already know my logic is flawed. I thought I was onto something here, I was gonna be writing relationship guidance books and making a trusty name for myself. I’d even looked into copywriting the term ‘Relationshit’. But I was a fool.” Now he turns his back to the audience, then he swivels and paces in circles, pinching the skin between his eyebrows. “We broke up the next day,” he sighs. “We couldn’t look each other in the eye anymore." 

He’s done well, he thinks, and he looks out to the sea of heads, the packed ornate boxes and the balcony, but inevitably, he finds the man in the aisle seat on the fifth row and the theatre empties. It’s just them, looking at each other, Eddie with such disdain, Richie with a longing that he doesn’t even know exists. That’s how Richie knows he’s done well tonight; the negative reception from a familiar unfamiliar face is the appraisal he’s been missing. 

“I’ve told a little bit of a lie though. I do have a significant other,” his face holds a pensive gaze and his eyes are fixed on Eddie. It’s a confession he’d rather not make. “His name is Graham. He’s a pomeranian, and whilst I have yet to ask him to shit on my chest, it’s enough that he lets me scoop up his little turds every single day. That, to me, is true love.”

Eddie shifts in his seat, his complexion washes over, greys, and his dark eyes widen as they fall uncomfortably to the ground. Richie’s heart is in his throat, which freezes over to numb the pain of it, sealing words within. There’s enough laughter around the place to conceal the moment, to make it utterly private in amongst this tumultuous ocean of hilarity. Richie watches as Eddie rises to his feet and walks stiffly out of the theatre, and the anxiety rising in him presents itself in a frantic jumble of words that ends the audience on a high note, but Richie on the rim of panic. “Well, the guy that called me an asshole has just left, which means his mother is here to pick him up, and you know what? After this cathartic retelling of my relationship woes tonight, I think I’m ready to end my sabbatical and go in for round two. Wish me luck.” He leaps from the stage and chases after Eddie. 

* * *

He hasn’t got far, much to Richie’s relief. He finds Eddie in the lobby, pacing and rubbing the back of his neck, seemingly releasing the steam that Richie had filled him with through gags about shit and make belief girlfriends. He approaches with caution, somehow clued into the other man's tendency to fly off the rails, and speaks with such a gentle juxtaposition to the crude alpha male persona he’d just assumed on stage, that the possibility of startling Eddie is extremely low. And yet, he still flinches.

“Hey,” Richie begins nervously, and his hands find the deepest corners of his pockets to hide within. “I just wanna start by saying I’m really sorry about that shit I pulled on Twitter. That was super weird. I was drunk and confused and I just, well, you know how it happens.”

Eddie’s terrifyingly quiet, rendering Richie to rock on shaking heels. He tries a different angle.

“Can we...start again?”

That gets Eddie started. His head snaps up, his shoulders square, and every section of his expression is pure fury.

“No. No we fucking can’t start again. That shit you pulled was fucking creepy, dude. Not only that, but you lied to me. Which really sucks because all weirdness aside, I actually enjoyed talking to you. But the worst of all of it is that you fucking facefished me. You’re a fucked up, weird guy. I can’t believe I’m-”

“-facefished?”

“Yeah, you know, like pretending to be someone else on the internet.”

“Oh. That’s called catfishing.”

“Right, catfish, whatever the fuck, I don’t care. You’re a creep and I want you to stay the fuck away from me, ok?”

Richie says nothing for a moment, and then: “how did I lie to you?”

Eddie pulls a face that says it’s an obvious answer, condescending and over exaggerated. “By leading me to believe you hated Richie Tozier. Because you-”

“No, that definitely was not a lie.”

The scene goes mute, their eyes stay latched, and despite the awkwardness of it all, it’s a moment Richie has caught himself off guard imagining so many times in this past week. No screens between them, names out in the open, and Richie’s unrelenting desire for vulnerability spread out before them.

“I’m not doing this. This is fucked up.” Eddie smashes through the moment like a man-sized meteorite, and Richie can’t suppress his instinctive flinch. Everything within him wants this to last, no matter the strange atmosphere, the tension, the embarrassment of being caught at his own ridiculous game, but it seems his out of chances. Until Eddie throws up his hands, palms forward in some frustrated motion, and Richie catches a glimpse of something on his left palm.

“Wait. Wait- just one thing. How did you get that scar?”

Eddie looks down at it, blinking like he’s in disbelief, like he’s never noticed it before. For the moment he’s looking at that mark, his aggressive guard drops and he’s stripped down, looking defenceless and somewhat vulnerable.

“I don’t… I can’t remember,” he mutters to himself more than to Richie, and in a harsh, panicked motion he snaps his hand away, balls it into a fist against his chest and cradles it with his other hand. Like he needs to protect it. “Why? I don’t want to know if it’s weird.”

“Because,” Richie says patiently, and holds out his own left palm to display a near identical mark. “I don’t remember how I got mine, either.”

Eddie looks unimpressed. “What’s this got to do with anything? This is just a dumb coincidence.”

“You really think that?”

“Yep.”

“Bullshit.”

“How so?”

“Why are you here? You hate me. Why did you stand up and call me an asshole in front of thousands of people as soon as you saw me? You had no reason to. You know it too - there’s something we’re...I don’t know. But I know you. I’m sure of it. And I need to find out how.”

Eddie appears to loosen his posture a little, relaxes the grip around his scarred hand. He’s considering it, and Richie’s hopeful heart is beating out a samba.

“Fine.”

* * *

The plan is to meet after the show’s over as Richie has another short set, for which Eddie reluctantly agreed to endure. After, they’ll go to a bar. And they’ll talk. With this knowledge bouncing around his head, Richie’s more nervous for this second set than he was for the first, and it’s a miracle he’s even standing on the sidelines of the stage for his knees have liquefied. He has no idea what he’s going to say through the next ten minutes, feels heavily less prepared than he did before. Half of him is tempted to blow it for the amusement of Eddie, who had to witness what was probably Richie’s best bit for a long time. But he won’t, because for the first time in a long time, he feels like his batteries have been changed.

Before he goes back on, he asks for a walking stick (when was the last time he used props?). He waits for his introduction and then he hobbles to the spotlight to the soundtrack of slow laughter and gentle applause.

When he gets to the microphone, he gazes out to the heads doused in blue, and then turns his vision to Eddie and croaks: “She’s an unforgiving lover, your mother. Rest In Peace, my cock and balls.”

A deafening tidal wave of laughter swallows him, and he swears, he sees Eddie Kaspbrak smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok so I'm not confident with the stand up bit like at all. I think that's one of the reasons why this chapter took me so long, because I wanted to feature it, but it's daunting trying to write something funny.  
so this is the part where I ask you to use your imaginations just a little more without my input.... let's pretend that was a really good show, and the story will carry on as I intended. fanx.
> 
> thank you Morgan for unyielding support and help <3


	8. The Memory Jog Project (Pt.1)

_What are you gonna do when you get out of jail?_  
_I’m gonna have some fun!_  
_What do you consider fun?  
_ _Fun, natural fun!_

Richie grimaces as the warm vinaigrette of red wine coats his taste buds, and circles his fingers around the bottle centre to the table, corked, half empty, and split between him and his company. He tips it toward him and tops up an already full enough glass; the bottles contents now holds a quarter, and Eddie watches the red tide pull out with a judgemental angle of his brow.  


“This song annoys me,” Richie says, slowly, the delayed accompaniment to his pre-top up sneer. “The backing track is cool. Hoppy. But the lyrics are just stupid. Really, just stupid - don’t you think?”  


Eddie is silent, seemingly stuck in the limbo of observation and the altogether chagrin of being here in the first place._ What is he doing here? _Richie wonders this with the resentful excitement of his question following him on a tailwind and knocking him breathless._ He didn’t take much persuading, not much at all. He knows I’m right. He feels it too._ And he outwardly scoffs at himself which, of course, summons a harsher angled brow on Eddie’s puzzled features. Still silent, though, much to Richie’s dismay. Funny how this situation is so adversed to what Richie had imagined, which he is ashamed to admit had been a constant scenario in his mind over the past week or so. It is frightening to acknowledge how often his train of thought diverted back to the man in his messages, and all the more frightening now that that man sits opposite him, in physical form, block lifted. Richie waits until Eddie looks to his lap, or checks his phone - until he essentially drops his guard - and every time he does, Richie's eyes are upon him with fondness, and with an indescribable hunger, and he can't fathom it even himself so god forbid Eddie should catch him.  


"Why are you looking at me like that?"  
Too late.  


Richie straightens and, as if it counts for something, tosses his head to the side like he's trying to pretend he wasn't looking at all. Eddie's looking at him beneath a low brow, with a pouting mouth prepared to use some of that quick wit Richie has grown to adore. The accusatory question Eddie had voiced hangs in the air like it's a stench neither of them can ignore, until it becomes so pungent that Richie has to purify it.  


"Like what?" He says, and winces after the sentence completes. The predictability of it, the display of a wide open goal for Eddie to shoot at unceasingly.  


"Like," shockingly, Eddie stalls. "Like I'm a piece of meat or- or no, it’s not that. It’s something, though, and I don’t like it. And I want you to stop it.” He has his index finger pointedly extended, his elbow supporting the tense arm it extends from, and he’s looking at Richie with the opposite sentiment to the way Richie looks at him - whatever way that is, as to both men, it’s apparently undiagnosable. “So fucking stop it. I don’t want to be here, so, that’s the least you can do. Also you’re right - this song sucks. Sucks nearly as bad as your show did tonight.”  


“Seeing as your mom is the sucking world champ, you should know-”  
“Oh, hilarious! Really! You really are just as fucking annoying in person as you are on TV. Not that I should even be surprised by that.”  
“I mean, you gained like 10,000 Twitter followers on the back of my career, so-”  
“-so I owe you a thank you? Is that what you’re saying? Bullshit, dude.”  
“What I’m saying, if you’d let me finish, is that I don’t exactly get why you’re complaining. You think I’m annoying; fine. But you’re benefiting from that opinion so it’s not all bad.”  
“So you’re basically saying I owe you a thank you.”  
“You’re welcome.”  
“Fuck you.”  
“Fuck you right back!”  
“I don’t even know why I agreed to this bullshit in the first place. I hate you. I’ve said it enough.”  
“Mhm. You hate me. You hate me so much that you Tweet about me non stop and attend my shows on opening night.”  
“I hate that I’m literally feeding your ego with all that.”  
“You are a little bit, yeah.”  
“God save us all if your head blows up any bigger.”  
“You’ve got me so wrong, man.”  
“I don’t think so.”  
“Well, I’m telling you, you’ve got me wrong.”  
“I literally don’t care enough for you to convince me on that, so save your breath.”  
“Why are you here then?”

Eddie pauses, perhaps to reload ammunition, perhaps because he’s stumped on his answer. Either way, he gives nothing away on his features, which remain a stubborn slate of nothingness. His fingers grip the stem of his glass which lifts to his lips, Richie does his best not to watch in a way that Eddie would latch onto as fuel for ranting hatred.

Eventually, Eddie subsides with his answer and assumes a defeated tone to say; “I don’t know. That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?” He tips the rest of the red from the bottle to his glass.

Richie bites through a cynical laugh. “You hate me.” He says with woe dredging up from a wine soaked stomach. 

Eddie nods, but he doesn’t look at the owner of said hatred. “I do. A lot.”

“Why?” Richie’s windowed eyes beg for contact, and to their masochistic delight, are granted their wish by a coal dark stare.

“Again, I wish I knew.”

But Richie doesn’t buy it. He takes the warmth of wine into his mouth and waves for another bottle, shakes off the shiver inducing sting the gulp leaves behind, and hopes that more of it might introduce a heating spark to those coal like eyes.  
“There has to be something,” Richie insists, and he’s leaning forward on the table, shoulders bunching at his ears as his arms envelope around his dwindling glass. “Can you remember the first time you saw me?”

Eddie considers this, and matches Richie’s posture, looks almost relaxed in his chair at the prospect of reminiscing. “Yeah, must have been six years back. I was flicking through the channels, as you do when it’s late and your wife normally commandeers the TV so you gotta wait until she’s asleep. I can’t remember what channel, or what programme, but I remember this feeling-”  
The way he trails off, the way his gaze finds a spot in the middle distance to fixate upon as they light up with something close to elation, like the feeling of recalling a feeling is enough to make him glow all over...it makes Richie sit up straighter, his shoulders unbunch, his eyes become wide and alert.  
“-it was like you’d reached out through the screen and pinched my cheek. Like- like you smacked me round the face. Not in an ‘oh who’s this guy, he’s super annoying’ way. Not like that at all. It was an ‘oh. _This guy’ _way. Does that make sense?”

Richie gapes, and thinks, _yes that makes sense. Yes it makes sense. **Yes, it fucking makes sense. **_But it exits him as: “No, not even a little bit.” and he takes a swig to silence his itching tongue.

Eddie, with good reason, presses on vehemently. “It wasn’t like I’d discovered something new and annoying, it was like I’d been annoyed by you before. Like, incessantly,” he takes a swig to encourage his stubborn lips. “Honestly, I flicked onto that channel and seeing you, it flicked on a light in my brain, and suddenly, I’m pissed off. At everything. It was like you unlidded all this bottled up rage in me, so I couldn’t leave it alone. I had to seek you out, on TV, on Twitter, on Youtube. I needed-”  
A sharp breath. He’s said too much, and he blinks across the table’s surface that his eyes had rampantly searched in the midst of his spiel, and up to the face of the comedian, who can only blink in return.  
“I don’t know why I just told you all that.”  
“Because I asked.”  
“Well, yeah, but-”  
“You said more than you meant to?”  
“Obviously, that’s what I’m saying now.”  
“You don’t need to hold back, Eddie.”

Pandemonium falls away and becomes only background noise; their table slips into its own dimension, and as tense as it is, it’s only them now. 

“We don’t know each other,” Eddie husks out through stinted breaths. He folds his hands together before him, and Richie watches their movements with undivided attention. “No matter what we feel, the fact is that we’re strangers, and that’s it.” He has lovely hands, neat and cared for, and the white skin that veils clenched knuckles catch Richie’s eye, which then makes the predicted journey to the damning silver ring on Eddie’s wedding finger. 

“I think we both know that’s not true.” Richie says, delicately, but in a way that won’t be argued with, and Eddie breathes out through his nose, his lips pressed together, eyes screwed shut. 

“I don’t know what that means, Richie. I don’t know what this is.”  
“Neither do I. But it’s something.”

Eddie hesitantly looks up, relaxes the tension in his shoulder, and timidly agrees: “Something.”

Richie smiles, nods, and Eddie is a beacon parting the punishing mist in his brain. As if it’s something that needs to be confirmed, Richie thinks,_ I can’t let him go again, _and somewhere in the back of his head chimes a distant, teasing tone that says:_** “third time lucky.”**_

It’s something. And that will do for now.

\----

It’s far too early for his phone to be buzzing, but as his memories of the night before flood his consciousness, he leaps to it with an eagerness though his eyes lag in their first blinks into filtering morning sunlight.  


“Morning.” He croaks with a hopefulness, but it’s not who he wants. It’s Fred. Of course it’s Fred.  


“Good morning to you, man of the hour! Why weren’t you at the after party last night? Everyone was talking about you.”  


Richie delays, rubs his eyes, and leans against the headboard.  


“Oh, the after party. Yeah, they wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t have my ID.”  
“You missed out. Well, you were missed. It wasn’t much fun without you.”  
“Mhm. Out of interest, if I’d managed to sweet talk my way through the door, would you have let me have a drink?”  
“A white wine spritzer, maybe. You did me proud, so I would have let you have a little reward, yeah!”  


“Damn. Can’t believe I missed out on that.” His pleasant tone is feigned. It’s 9am, his head has a tightness wrenched by bottles of red from the night before, and his mind is on Eddie. But he tries his best. “So I’m out of your bad books? You liked my act?”  


“Rich, that was the best I’ve seen you for a long time. I’d like to think it was my pep talk that gave you the wake up call but…”  
Fred does this thing when he means to imply something, when he’s not quite got the balls to say it, and it presents as a trailing of syllables, a slur of sounds sliding through teeth. Richie takes the bait.  


“Audience interaction.” As non-specific as possible.  


“Exactly. You really bounced off that guy. The whole thing with his Mom. I mean, ‘your mom’ jokes are juvenile but you played it great. Everyone loved it. Was it scripted?”  
“Uh, no, actually. Just kind of came out of nowhere.” _Like I’d made all those jokes a million times before,_ he doesn’t say.  
“Who was that guy? Seemed pretty pissed off with you.”  
“An old friend.” He’s not sure if that’s a lie or not.  
“Can we put him in the audience for the rest of the run?”  


Richie sits up, then, startled (or excited) and stutters: “why?”  
“Because having him in the audience to bounce off of, like I said, clearly worked for you.”

The idea of this, for either seconds or minutes (he can’t quite tell in his fizzy-headed state), renders him tongue tied, dry mouthed and gormless. He thinks back to the night before, to the trigger Eddie’s presence in the fifth row had had on him, to the ignition of a nostalgic yet long forgotten humour. He thinks of the laughter he’d conducted and how it reverabted through the venue until it was white noise, and how the faces of the crowd became only landscape to the image of Eddie. Richie remembers the way Eddie had unlocked, how he’d spoken with such lack of control, and how he’d stunned himself in his own revelations. And how he’d accepted that they weren’t strangers, or near enough. He’d accepted that there was something. 

“That’s a great idea Fred.” Richie says at last. It’s something of a white lie, because it’s a great idea for his job, yes. But it’s symbiotically a great idea because it gives Richie a lead on instigating a second meeting with Eddie. He thanks Fred in ways the manager won’t know, hangs up, and makes another call.

“Hey, Eddie. What are you doing tonight?”


	9. The Memory Jog Project (Pt. 2)

“I’m confused.”

“What’s there to be confused about? It’s simple, really. You just need to turn up-”

“No, I understand what you want me to do, I just don’t get why.”

“Oh. I thought that was pretty simple too.”

“Not at all.”

“Ok. Sorry. My manager thought that it was the best show I’ve done for a long time and for some reason he credited you, to some extent. He said that having you in the audience to bounce off of clearly worked for me. It was all his idea.”

“Well shit.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry if this is a lot, or whatever. I know it’s kind of weird.”

“A little. But - really?_ That_ was your best show for a long time? I think I’ve been underestimating your mediocrity.”

“I’ve been off the horse for a while dude, come on.”

“You were on the horse at some point? 

“Truthfully, no. I’ve never been much into riding. Well, unless your mom’s involved.”

“Jesus fucking Christ. Do you want me to block your number?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“You don’t think I would? I blocked you on Twitter already, so-”

“Yeah, but that was before-”

Richie’s voice cuts and gives way for the crackle of the phone line, and symbiotically, a disorientating static in his head. Before what? He guesses before all those stampeding emotions he'd been keeping to himself came to life and caught up with the both of them. Before they met face to face, and established an uncracked code that linked them. Before literally everything became so much more difficult to articulate. 

"-before we talked." He finishes, failing to make it through the rush of a million feelings crowding his mind. 

They'd shared another bottle last night. It was summoned by Eddie, believe it or not, who in their interval of speech that came after communal agreement of there being 'something', had slid from his chair (which naturally caused Richie's heart to spasm with panic), but not left, and instead steered for the bar.

He came back with it gripped, knuckles practically blistering through the translucent skin that contained them, and promptly shared out the entire thing between their two glasses. Richie had stared at the goblet that boasted a whole half of the bottle, and wondered with both excitement and nervousness, what on earth had possessed Eddie - who throughout their entire interaction, had been the one to be tugged at by Richie's lead - to so boldly suggest the continuation of their meeting. 

Despite the evoked astonishment over such a gesture, Richie didn't say a word to begin with, and neither did Eddie. Both focused on their own glasses, both (more than likely) weighing up the risks of downing the entire contents in one. Neither did such thing.

Eventually, Eddie had been the one to puncture the suffocating seal of silence. 

"So you can't remember where you got your scar from either?"

Richie unfolded his clenched, clammy palm and moved to display the mark to the both of them. Eddie did the same.

They both looked so alike, as alike as might have been possible for a simple mark splicing the centre of their head, heart, and life lines. Richie's appeared longer than Eddie's, but both were positioned diagonally, and stranger still, both had faded the exact same amount, denoting a similar age. 

"Whenever I acknowledge mine, it stings. Like really stings," Eddie said, flexing his fingers so they bowed down to meet the scar. "Does yours?"

"Yeah," Richie copied Eddie's action, only somehow with less grace. "Like it's reminding me it's not just a physical scar."

Eddie had gone extremely quiet then, and Richie remembers something now that has an impact equivalent to a knuckle dustered punch to the heart, and he thinks hard with hope that the memory isn't fallacious. With maintained silence, Eddie had turned his hand over, and timidly traced Richie's scar with his finger. Richie surfaces the memory for as long as he can, tries his best to summon whatever feeling had passed over them in that moment too; _please let that be real,_ he inwardly pleads, _please don't say I made that up. _

Though he does remember marvelling at how Eddie's skin had felt as soft as it looked, and despite it's crapulent camouflage, Richie's brain had most certainly been subjected to a series of lightning strikes of the most glorious sensation. 

It must have been real.

"So weird," Eddie uttered, somewhat absentmindedly and with a blink-and-you'd-miss-it affection that Richie definitely blinked and missed. Then Eddie took his hand away and curled his fingers around the stem of his wine glass, and Richie did the same. "Do you know- I mean, where are you from?"

Richie didn't miss that, though. The slip of the tongue, the clue into further strange things in common...

"I can't remember specifically."

"Oh."

"I'm guessing the same goes for you?"

"Huh?"

"Well, it's just you went to say 'do you remember where you're from?', and that's a weird question."

"I wasn't going to say that."

"So you_ can _remember specifically where you're from?"

A pause, and Eddie had clenched his jaw. Richie could tell that he didn't want to admit it, that he didn't want there to be more branches in common added to their skeletal tree, and Richie himself was stressed at the thought of there being even more to think about. But Eddie, Richie noted, wasn't particularly good at hiding his thoughts - particularly those of vexation. 

"I'm from Maine, allegedly. That's what my parents say, but whenever I've asked where specifically they just tend to breeze over the question like it was never brought up. As for my childhood itself, which obviously existed in some sort of - I don't know - oubliette, I can barely remember a thing. I don't think it was a bad childhood. Like, when I think about it I'm not hit with any bad feelings or anything. In fact, I tend to get a warm feeling in my stomach. Well, I lied a little there. Like I said, when I pay attention to my scar I get this throbbing pain in my palm and like, hints of what could be an overwhelming fear. But it's watered down and in the background. I don't know where it comes from, because I barely remember anything from that time. As far as I'm aware, I powered on when I was 18. My first clear memories are of waking up in the back of my Mom and Dad's car, desperate for a cigarette. I remember feeling like I'd left a hell of a lot behind, in fact, I remember thinking I wasn't actually in the car, just like astral projecting into the scene."

Eddie nodded, and then chose something particularly odd to pick up on:

"Oubliette. Like in that movie with David Bowie and the goblins?"

Richie's smile had made his eyes glint in their crescent moon shape. "Exactly! Labyrinth. I love that film - maybe I was stolen by Bowie when I was a kid and raised with the goblins and that's why I can't remember anything."

"Huh. In that case, maybe I was too. I think I'd remember being raised by David Bowie, though."

"Because of his spectacularly overt package?"

Much to Richie's astonishment (and not to mention delight), Eddie had fallen into laughter that would be impossible to contain, and the way he held himself indicated to Richie that he really did want to keep it to himself. 

It got easier from there. They moved on from the talk of forgotten pasts and things that might have been, things that they could have shared but were too sceptical (or too afraid) to step into. The wine glasses that they had both considered rinsing dry upon pouring, were instead nursed, and an hour after Eddie's first peak of laughter, a quarter of a glass remained for both of them. Unfocused upon and neglected, the red wine seemed to spoil, where exposed to the air (instead of its intended journey to the stomach), it had stung both their mouths with sharp vinaigrette. An excuse formed then, both citing that the wine was no longer good hence why it went wasted; only it hadn't been oxygen that had rendered the wine inedible, but the conversation that had carried itself without the aid of any inebriated tongues made red and loose by House Merlot.

Richie can't remember how it ended, but somehow, Eddie's number had landed in his address book - that much was proven. He tries to dig deeper for more information but cannot (he chastises himself for the addition of half an evening to his collection of blurry memories involving Eddie), he tries to recall their goodbye - did they hug? Did they agree to see each other again?

"Hello?" 

“Shit,” that’s right - they were talking through the logistics of seeing each other again now. Richie zones back in to the fizzled out rant that he’d missed, and Eddie tuts. “I was miles away. Sorry, man. Tonight, yeah?”

“If you’d have been paying attention just now you’d have heard me say that I can’t just go out two nights running. What the hell am I supposed to tell my wife?”  
“I don’t know,” (and I don’t really care) “the truth maybe?”

“Right. Right, the truth which is that I’m seeing a comedy show again after seeing it already just last night. The- the truth that I’m seeing it because I have some weird, I don’t know, freaky connection with this comedian I’ve been publicly shading, and that really, seeing the show again is just a convenience to us meeting up again? None of that will fly, Rich, because none of that makes sense. I'm going to have to lie to her, which I hate doing, because she always sees through me. I'll lie and say I have meetings in Chicago or something, and I'm staying away until the weekend.”

Richie’s heart convulses on two separate occasions there. The first is with the word ‘connection’, which has obviously tumbled from Eddie’s mouth without hope of being caught whereas with Richie, it had been thought but never dreamed of being actioned. They have a connection - it isn’t just Richie being something of an adorable, optimistic fool. The second convulsion is kicked with the deliverance of the nickname. Rich. Not that it’s a far stretch from his name, not that it’s something only Eddie could ever call him, but because it denoted a familiarity that Eddie had yet to consciously convey, and all the while that familiarity slipped through the resistant barrier of Eddie’s stubborn exterior, Richie would grasp it with a grip that his middle-aged joints would protest to but obey.

Instead of translating said convulsions into words, Richie homes in on something else instead. “Is that right? Shading? I don’t think that’s how they say it.”

“Wh- who the fuck is they?”

“The kids.”

Eddie is, yet again, sent off the edge of sanity with a poke to the back by Richie’s facetiousness.

#### 

Wednesday 20th July 2016 - The Night Of The 2nd Show

They have somehow managed to agree on a plan, a simple one, that neither will be able to muddle up.

The show went as swimmingly as the night before, and Eddie was in the crowd as he promised. His presence had had the same effect on Richie as it had in the first - this swelling nostalgia rising in him, filling him up, spilling over all this uncontrollable devilish humour he’d not piped out in years. If Richie wasn’t as greedy as he is, he’d say that the effect Eddie has on his work alone is enough. That greed, however, has other plans, and thankfully Eddie is willing to go along with them.

Richie waits where they agreed - the lobby's staircase to the right side balcony - and does his very best not to continuously check his phone like he had in the days leading up to him meeting Eddie. It's an excruciatingly hot presence in his jean pocket, stinging his thigh and sending gnawing brain waves to Richie's ears that do all they can to turn away. The show is still going, but Richie's set is done. They have approximately 10 minutes to flee from the theatre's doors opening and release of crowds of eager fans, that would surely spot Richie and be on him like a plague of locusts. 

But Eddie's not there, and Richie's nervous - Eddie’s either keeping him waiting or has got cold feet, opting for the cowards option of remaining secured and sheltered by the audience who will carry him out of Richie’s sight in unintended entourage. 

When Eddie bursts through the doors, Richie’s caught in the eye of such a vicious hurricane that he barely notices until Eddie’s clicking his fingers in his face.

“Hey, Richie, you there?” He’s saying, and eventually, Richie lets those words drag him out of the storm.

“What took you so long?” He asks, something of anger biting at the heels of the question.

“Nadine Beckett was on and she was on fire. I was enjoying it, she was way better than you-”

“I know Nadine Beckett was on, she was on after me last night as well-”

“Yeah, but I didn’t get to see it last night.”

“That’s not my problem.”

“So what’s your problem now?”

Richie breathes deep for once, and thinking that deep breathing is supposed to be calming, is perplexed by his intake of oxygen blowing at the flame within him, that grows, and roars, and swallows his temper whole. “My problem is that we have a tight window of time to slip away from this shit. My problem, Eddie, is that if we were to miss that window, I would be rounded on by hundreds of people, begging for pictures and autographs and I wouldn’t be able to get away._ We _wouldn’t be able to get away.”

He’s silent after that little outburst, and Eddie is too. They blink in syncopation, and say nothing while Richie regains composure. 

“I’m sorry. That was kind of over the top. I’m just really on edge,” _because this means a lot and I don’t want us to fuck it up,_ he keeps to himself. “If you want, I can, I don’t know, get you Nadine’s autograph.”

Eddie shakes his head and beckons Richie - wordlessly - back to their circuitous task of intended, yet awkward, reminiscing. “It’s cool.” He says, and though it’s unconvincing, it’s a reminder to Richie that whatever he’s feeling, Eddie’s feeling it too. All those mixed up, gut twisting moments of perplexity are completely shared. It’s a strange comfort to have, but he’ll take it.

“Shall we go? Trust me when I say, you really don’t want to get caught up in a mob of fans.” 

“I do trust you with that, actually. Especially not your fans - I bet they’re a load of total morons.”

Richie laughs as they exit the theatre together.

* * *

They stand before a squarish building painted a hideous mint green, it’s door is a barred metal, it’s windows similarly contained. “Are those to stop people getting in, or to stop them jumping out?” Richie asks humorously, which raises a brow of the doorman, a stocky man lathered in tattoos and piercings. 

“You said you wanted me to bring you to my favourite place in the city,” Eddie says with gesticulating arms and a tint of pride in his voice. “This is it. The Deco.”

“Huh,” Richie takes it in; it’s an establishment that’s quite the opposite of what he was expecting, and he’ll tell that to Eddie too. “I definitely did not have you down as the kind of guy to frequent Metal Bars is all.”

“Were you expecting a strip club?”

“Definitely not that either.”

“You’ll like it here. I haven’t been for a while - Myra hates it. But it always felt like home to me.”

Richie scans the scene that they enter. It’s a surprisingly well lit bar, giving light to sparse table space, red carpeted floors and a giant stained glass dome window in the ceiling. It stinks, and the surface beneath their shoes somehow feels sticky. There are girls in fishnets and massive buckled boots, men with beards that touch their belts, people with multicoloured mohicans, and then there’s Eddie, who stands neatly with his hands in the pockets of his pressed burgundy jacket.

Richie, safe to say, is beyond baffled. 

“Home, huh?”

“‘I can’t explain it. It’s just the way it is.”

“I’m not judging,” a lie - he absolutely is. “Just a bit surprised, that’s all.”

“They do pint sized pre-mixed cocktails and they’re all named after Norse Myth.”

Unsurprisingly, Richie’s on board with that. Eddie gets a Frost Giant and Richie gets a Valhalla, they find a booth, and they both sink into the atmosphere that Eddie allegedly loves so much. It’s a moment or two of silently basking in it, and as strange as it is (for the environment is not a pleasant nor relaxing one in the slightest) Richie feels that speaking a single word would be like shattering an egg and getting its shell in the baking mixture. So he doesn’t, and eventually, Eddie does. 

“I started coming here when I first moved to New York. I was - I must have been 22, and like you said last night, it was like I powered on then. I drove my mom and I from Maine - specifically what part of Maine, I couldn’t tell you - and we came here because my aunt was dying, and my mom wanted to be with her for the last of it. They were both widows so had no one else, and Aunt Maude had no kids so she was extra alone and sad. It was sad, really. My mom passed not long after, and I think it was in a matter of months after that when Myra and I met, and she moved in pretty much straight away. So I was always around these women, these - well, I don’t want to speak too venomously of my wife but - my mother and my aunt were suffocating. Overbearing, too concerned about my health which, I’m pretty sure, was fine. I think I had a lot of pent up anger as a result of being essentially smothered by them both, but because I can’t remember what happened before I drove us here, I’ve always beat myself up for blaming them for my anger when, for all I know, I could just be suppressing something completely unrelated to the both of them. So my first coherent memory, kind of like yours, was a car journey, but I was driving and it was like I’d filled the tank with just-” Richie notices the way his fingers grip the table edge, how his teeth are gritted, his jaw is clenched. “-bitterness, and hurt, and anger, and all these bad feelings that existed within the car, within me, I just didn’t know where or why. I started coming here because it was as good as any other bar, just a bit cheaper, and it has this atmosphere that made me feel content in this anger that...well, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, never went away. I’ve always had a temper, always had a short fuse, but coming here helped me channel it.”

It’s a lot to take in, so Richie meekly nods and sips his drink, until he says, “the drinks taste like pissy lemonade.”

“They do. They’re not that alcoholic, but they’re cheap, so after 4 or 5 you’re a mess - trust me.”

“I do!” Richie’s laughing, he’s softened into unyielding comfort. “I do trust you, being the regular that you are.”

Eddie’s laughter is gentle, and lost behind his pint glass. “So you get why this dive has a special place in my heart.”

“I do get it, and I’m really glad you shared.”

“I don’t know what it is,” Eddie’s hands are now back on the table, and Richie’s surprised that the other man isn’t squealing at the prospect of touching the germ infested, sticky surface. Simultaneously, Richie’s wondering frantically how he even knows to be surprised over that. His wondering ceases when Eddie speaks again. 

“Sharing things with you keeps getting easier by the minute.”

#### 

Thursday 21st July, 2016 - The Night Of The 3rd Show

“Would you mind not, like, doing that with the cashews?”

“Doing what? I’m eating cashews.”

“You’re pretty much spitting them everywhere. I’m allergic to them, dude - if you spit cashew juice on me I could realistically die.”

“Cashew juice. You’re ridiculous. You don’t actually believe you’re allergic to ‘cashew juice’, do you?”

“It’s not a case of believing it, dickwad, it’s life threatening. Same with egg, gluten and soy.”

“Eddie.”

“What?”

“Why are we at a Thai restaurant if you’re allergic to like, 80% of the ingredients.”

“Because it had good reviews on Tripadvisor, and we went somewhere horrible last night, so tonight I thought it would be nice if we came somewhere nice. Don’t be ungrateful. Fuck.”

“The Deco was not horrible.”

“You’re just saying that to spare my feelings. Don’t worry, I know it’s shitty.”

“It was kind of shitty, I guess. I went to the restroom and there was the nastiest toilet brush I’ve ever seen on the ground, and-”

“Jesus, Rich. Over dinner? Who the fuck raised you?”

“My mother raised me perfectly. Your mother is responsible for raising my dick, though. Many times.”

“Are you seriously going to keep on with the gross jokes about my mom, even though I told you last night that she’s dead?”

Richie raises an eyebrow, and Eddie tuts his loudest tut.

“Forget I asked.”

“I can’t help it, Eds. They just come naturally to me when you’re around.”

“Lucky me. What did I do to deserve being the trigger for so many of your terrible jokes?”

“I think you secretly love my terrible jokes.”

“Nope.”

“I think you do. Logically, it makes a lot of sense.”

“I’m confirming for you now that it doesn’t, because I don’t. I really don’t.”

“I’ll figure it out. We’ll work out the meanings behind all this and you’ll see. Deep down, you find me hilarious.”

They agree to disagree.

#### 

Friday 22nd July - The Night Of The 4th Show

“I can’t believe this still gets shown in movie theatres,” Eddie says with a mouth full of popcorn. “It’s so old!”

“Nearly as old as us, Eddie Spaghetti. But not quite,” slowly, Richie begins to edge with purposeful struggle down to his seat next to Eddie. “I dare say we’ve aged better than this classic, though.”

“I wonder how Bowie’s infamous bulge looks remastered on the big screen.”

“Please stop objectifying my adoptive father, Eddie.”

“I will if you stop objectifying my dead mother.”

“I can’t, that’s just not a realistic bargain. I think we’re just going to have to accept that we were both raised by iconic sex symbols and leave it at that.”

During the movie, the audience around them quotes along, and Richie had hidden behind the excuse of watching them act along to the screen, to steal a glimpse or two of Eddie. If he’d been more in tune to the wider situation, rather than the singular one of his surreptitious looks, he might have noticed Eddie doing the same. Once or twice, their eyes catch one another and they smile. Once or twice, their hands might have brushed as they reached for popcorn. Once or twice, it might have been on purpose.

* * *

His phone goes and splits the night. He answers it, only half awake.

“Hey Rich, I know it’s late-” Richie removes the phone from his ear to check the fact and it is, indeed, late. He squints blindly at a small white 3 at the top of the screen above Eddie’s name, and only then does he register that it’s Eddie on the other end of the phone. He wakes up, not like he’s been nudged from sleep, but like he’s been revived from cardiac arrest. Bringing his phone back to his ear, Eddie’s voice continues to alight his consciousness and bring him back to life. “-I couldn’t go when I knew she’d be awake because she thinks I’m staying away for work and all so I waited until I knew she’d be asleep because she sleeps for the dead so I knew I’d be safe. I just had to go because I remembered and I knew it would help us with this, uh, with this investigation. Whatever we’re calling it, I like investigation, that’s brilliant, and this would be a vital clue to-”

“Eddie, slow down,” Richie croaks, and Eddie’s voice cuts out for a moment to let Richie’s complaint filter through. “You’re talking a mile a minute, Jesus fuck. What’s this about?”

“I was getting to that, asshole!” 

“You couldn’t just paraphrase whatever it is for me, could you? I was having the most wonderful dream,” (He’s barely breathing, actually; being woken up by Eddie in the middle of the night is something he thought to be the topic of his dreams and only that - the continuation of said wonderful dream has certainly merged over into the waking world.) “Unless it can wait until the morning.”

“No it can’t,” Eddie says briskly; Richie feels the impatience of his voice frost over his ear drum, and he wonders if he’s managed to execute the same palpable agitation in his own tone. Of course, respectively, he has not - whatever frustration he feels at being woken simply cannot budge it’s way past the blockage of pleasure at the situation. Adoration for Eddie, it seems, has taken up every inch of space within him. He thinks this while Eddie speaks, and knows that he most definitely should be paying attention. “Ok, basically, I remembered this old shoebox that I shoved in the attic when we moved in. It just kind of lept to the forefront of my mind and I had to go and get it, because for whatever reason, it was too important to forget about again. So I went to get it and sure enough, it’s-” He seems to choke, or maybe it’s a stifled laugh. Either way, Richie wishes he could reach through the phone and simply touch Eddie’s cheek, or some other heartfelt action that the moment, and Eddie, would allow. “-we really did know each other, Rich.”

Richie holds this in his head, lets it brew, thinks it through. _We really did know each other. _Until now, it had been mostly hypothesis, based on a feeling and a few arguably far stretched links. With Richie, there had never been a doubt in his mind that he and Eddie went way back, past the point that both their ageing brains allowed. From that first Tweet, Richie and Eddie had entered a garden of forking paths to endeavour together without hope of clear method, and for a while, it had been Richie that had traipsed back and forth over that network of paths that the knowledge of Eddie’s existence had weeded and exposed. It had been without much hope or agenda that his feet had wandered aimlessly across them, to no destination, without Eddie. Now, with these words, it’s all different, and Richie’s struggling to finish the journey words take from brain to mouth.

“I knew it.” is all he can say, and he can tell that Eddie’s nodding or something with the rustle of the phone. 

“I knew it too.” Eddie tells him, and Richie’s heart stops again.

“You did?”

“To some capacity, yeah,” 

“You can be pretty hard to read sometimes, you know?”

“So I’m told,” Eddie breathes a low laugh, and both men taste the unspoken language resting on their tongues with nothing but trepidation. “I’m coming to your hotel and we’re gonna go through this box.”

“Now?” Richie chokes.

“Yes, now. This can’t wait.”

Richie goes to, but leaves it, shutting down the temptation to take that sentence and change one simple word; “I can’t wait.”

Instead, what he says is this: 

“See you soon then, I guess.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shorter than I intended, but I really wanted to get a chapter out before the end of the decade. The next chapter is partially written, and once the whole fic's done, I'll be moving the whole thing to a new post, separating it into three parts. I'm not entirely happy with this - it's a breeze over, a lot of it, and I'll be fleshing it out a bit more in the next chapter. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this something!


	10. The Memory Jog Project (Pt. 3)

There’s a few sparse moments after the phone disconnects that sees Richie lying with eyes stuck in between the state of fluttering shut and wide openness, and while his mind does it’s very best to claw its way to awakeness, he tumbles through recollection of the nights leading up to this one. This one, in which Eddie woke him up by calling him in some excitable frenzy. This one, in which Eddie had insisted on coming to Richie’s hotel room. If this is reality, it sure does feel a lot like a dream. It feels so much like a dream, that Richie harbours no guilt in walking himself back through those nights; they’re like dreams too. The way they had found each other, reconnected like puzzle pieces who’s sections had jammed so clumsily into every other part of life, never knowing what they were missing all along. Their dynamic, such a coveted electricity they shared, was reconnected and revived, shedding light on dormant cogs and bolts that were previously rusty and redundant, and inevitably forgotten. It is something that daunts him, that he fears will be a burden of responsibility to Eddie should he discover the enlightening effect he’s had on Richie, and he doesn’t quite know how he’d even explain it, either. He doesn’t have a coherent mind to think the words, but in his mind, he pictures a sunflower raising its face towards the sun, and the image settles warmth in his belly like the petals bathed in rays.

If Richie was a meadows last wilting sunflower, then Eddie was the sun.

* * *

They had talked for hours on Tuesday night. Until closing time, in fact, and both had mumbled irritance at being kicked from the grotty bar Eddie had brought them to, despite it not being the kind of place in which one would necessarily want to wile away the hours of the evening. Richie’s sleep addled brain flicks through quotations from their conversation like they’re stored in a vending machine, and he’s impulsive with his selection, so ends up consuming everything within. He remembers one in particular, and that’s the one that tastes the best:

“Sharing things with you keeps getting easier by the minute.” Eddie had said.

Richie had smiled one of those smiles that stretched his mouth and felt like each corner could fall from his cheeks, but in being contained, only made each dimple deeper and more permanent. 

He had even dared to say, “So share something else.” and Eddie had countered with, “What do you want to know?” and Richie had eagerly suggested, “Anything.” and Eddie had smiled, and Richie had wanted to press photos of that smile in his memory, so that inside his head was nothing but a room of hanging negatives and developing shots of those beautiful lips in their many junctures of ever increasing bravery and fondness.

They had got to know one another better from there, not the versions of each other that they were well aware now existed in the depths of their medial temporal lobes, but the versions of themselves that they became without one another. The pop up versions of us, Richie intones.

“Do you have kids?” Richie asked, letting it fall from his mouth casually and keeping the ball and chain that attached around the question securely at the back of his tongue.  
“No,” Eddie cleared his throat and appeared to sadden; that ball and chain might have been intended to be restrained from Eddie, but of course, it would still bowl him over without Richie’s intention. The weight of the question on Eddie’s side couldn’t have been anticipated, nevermind the preservation of its weight on Richie's end. “We tried for a long time. Given up now. No use.”

Richie was quiet, and took each short sentence of Eddie’s like a punching bag at the mercy of a gloved set of knuckles. “I’m sorry, Eddie. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Don’t be an idiot!” Eddie had snapped, though when Richie looked at him, he saw that the other mans features were lined with warmth. “You didn’t know. It’s fine. And I’m not too hung up about it, really. Never tell her that, obviously. She really wanted kids.”

“How come you couldn’t have them?”

“We don’t know really. When we went to the doctors about it, they just kind of said that it was mostly a complication with Myra’s weight. Doing tests would have been a waste of time and money when that was the most likely reason.” He looked somewhat embarrassed as he tipped the chemical blue of his drink down his throat. “There was a point where I would have really liked to have a kid, I think. Now, and I really, really hate to say this - I’m kind of glad that I don’t. It would have been there to fix something shitty. Like, I thought about it like this: picture me on a see-saw, and sit Myra on one end and the kid on the other. She’d weigh us both down, and I’d just become a perpetual middle man. It would have been cruel. It would have been shit."

Richie had pushed a hum through his lips, denoting a loss for words, and Eddie had said (in what could have been presumed as an attempt to clear the air, but came across like a panicked effort to cover his vocal tracks) “I don’t love her any less because she couldn’t give me children.”

It was something that contradicted what he said before, and Richie hadn’t overlooked that, but he kept it to himself. It had not fallen on deaf ears that Eddie had referred to himself as a single person in the situation, saying "I'm glad that I don't" rather than "I'm glad that we don't", nor had he missed the suggestion that the child was a cure to 'fix something shitty'. He’s reciting these sentences of Eddie’s through his mind as he lies in his bed, rigid back, arms straight and stiff, and analysing every syllable with punctiliousness while wondering what Eddie meant by them. It takes him a little while to shake himself into the notion that he’s reading far too much into things, and thinks on, cautioning himself to tread lightly in picking apart these accounts this time. 

Naturally, Eddie was inclined to aim these personal questions straight back at Richie - however, Richie himself was inclined to dodge them.

“How come you’ve not settled with anyone?”

Richie recalls feeling like he could choke in that moment, and wished he’d had a glass of water to guzzle and/or throw over his burning face to cool it. He scrabbled around for an answer, but nothing good came.

In fact, he’d shrugged.

“C’mon,” Eddie had pressed on, and leaned forward almost like he was desperate to hear why Richie had been such a failure at finding love. Eddie was a sadistic bastard, and Richie was pathetic underneath his unintentional cruelty. “You’re successful, you’re charming, you’re...ok looking, and God knows why, but most people find you hilarious.”

The flattery only stoked the heat of his cheeks, but somehow, he managed to say, “If I was supposed to find someone, I guess they passed by too quick for me to catch them.” It was an explanation that, somehow, felt right. 

“That sucks,” Eddie had said, but where pity might have sunk into his voice, nothing but genuinity filtered through. “Man. So you have no memories of your entire childhood, and no one to make new memories with? I can’t imagine.”

“Well, fuck, thanks for reminding me that I’m the lonliness guy on the planet!”

It was maybe the first time since their reuniting that Richie had actually felt something close to mourning for his ineffective evocation of the past. He felt sorry for himself at that sticky table for two, just for a little while, like water had been thrown on his paper cased heart and wilted all the edges. But it evaporated when Eddie had nudged some kind of consolation his way, telling him with an ever so delicate tone, that married life was overrated anyway. 

Richie smiled, and let himself speak. 

“I’ve always joked about it, actually. Because of my lack of recollection of the first 18 years of my life, I came up with this theory that I’d made a deal with the devil, and traded them for fame and fortune. As I got older, I fleshed out the theory by saying that I must have traded in my ability to sustain a relationship, too. And then the latest addition to the bargain I must have made, is my ability to fall in love at all,” He shrugged again, and sipped his unnaturally orange drink, soaking his tongue in it’s bitterness as his words soured the taste moreso. “So basically I sold my soul and condemned myself to be alone for the rest of my life.”

“That’s so dumb,” Eddie’s laugh was definitely nervous, and nervous was his voice still when he asked, “you’ve never been in love with anyone?”

Richie’s heart has sprung from the pits of his belly to his throat that was far too tight to hold it. That battered old beating thing would try it’s best to wriggle it’s way out his mouth, but Richie would keep it down, knowing what it would say if given the chance.  
“Nope.” Was all he said, and his heart beat extra hard to say, until now.

Richie’s reminiscence of this temporary surge of feeling causes him to sweat, and replaces his third and fourth rib for throbbing parts that he’s urged to clutch. It was just like the way he felt after their third meeting, in fact, after their restaurant meal. Eddie had mentioned over dinner that he loved running, and he was really fast, but his mother had never liked him running because she was insistent that he was too sick to cope with the strenuous exercise. When she died, he had run the New York City Marathon, not to spite her, not to prove her wrong, but to prove himself - to himself. So when they’d left the restaurant, Richie’s inner child had snuck out and goaded Eddie into a race, which of course saw Eddie sprinting off way ahead, and Richie gracelessly stumbling after him, clutching the part of his chest that ached so much now. Eddie had run all the way back to him (and been smug with the double distance, too), and Richie remembers now, a heavy hand finding his shoulder, fingers gripping tight, and unbridled affection transmitting from their tips, through the layers of clothing, to Richie’s yearning skin. He can feel it like it’s there now, the power of his imagination manifesting the memory as tangible, and finding bare skin with no fabric to penetrate. And the way Eddie had looked at him as Richie raised from his doubled over position, that wide-eyed, adrenaline induced gaze with something like endearment simmering beneath it, the way he’d kept his hand there as Richie caught his breath. It was a wordless way of saying that as long as Richie did his best, Eddie knew it, and Eddie cherished every effort that was yet to come, and - if only he could - cherished every effort from their timidly unveiling past, too. In his bed, as he reels over and over this miniscule remembrance, his own hand moves across his body and up to meet the place that the phantom hand rests upon and he wishes it was real.

The buzzing of his phone reminds him with an unceremonious jolt that there is potential for that moment’s reenactment to become reality tonight.

‘What room are you’ a text from Eddie reads.  
‘237’ Richie replies.  
‘Coming up.’

Richie gets dressed and paces the hotel room floor.

* * *

“It’s cold as shit in here.” Eddie’s arrived with a battered old shoebox in his hands, and, naturally, a fresh complaint.

Richie, somehow still groggy from his backwards mind walks, trudges to his open suitcase with the innards of carelessly packed garments overflowing it’s contain, and picks out a mustard cable knit cardigan to toss Eddie’s way. Eddie leaps to the side to avoid it.

“It’s a cardigan, Eddie.”

“It’s from your dirties. I don’t want it.”  
“It’s clean. That’s just my suitcase.”

“Jesus. You ever heard of folding?”

“It’s less than a weeks worth of clothes. I didn’t see the point.”

“You disgust me,” against his protest, Eddie slips the cardigan over his narrow shoulders, and paces to the bed. “Can I sit?”

“I’m not sure you’d want to given your feelings about my suitcase.”

“Oh shut up. I’m just going to perch on the end.” 

Richie’s hesitant at first, perhaps still perplexed as to whether he’s in the waking world or not, but eventually he takes a place next to Eddie at the foot of his bed. 

On Eddie’s lap sits the treasured box. His hands hold each side with a tight grip, protective of its contents - Eddie knows what’s inside, while Richie is still none the wiser. Eddie’s looking at it, so intently that he wouldn’t have noticed Richie’s vision pinned ardently upon him, and not the box. This bridge of silence seems too brittle to cross, but soon, Richie’s so desperate that he just has to take that shaky step. 

“So what’s this all about then?” He puts it gently, but Eddie still flinches.

“Us. We did know each other.” It’s not what Richie was asking, but he still takes it like a new piece of information, exquisite to discover. 

“I know, you said. I meant what’s in the box?” He goes silly, of course. He has to. “What’s in the fucking box!?”

Eddie smirks and then takes a sharp inhale, and then a sharper exhale. “I’m going to give it to you, ok? I’ve already seen it all, obviously. I want to see what you think.” And Richie nods. While his curiosity is loud and his excitement bellowing above that, he still finds the mind power to joke about the situation. Eddie’s so serious, like this is some sort of illegal transaction. Well, Richie realises it could be something like that - best to get it over with and look.

He takes the box from Eddie’s shaking hands, and breaths in the way Eddie had - short and sharp, and undeniably nervous. But despite this, he moves the lid away precariously and drops it to the ground.

He might have expected it, had his imagination not been trapped beneath a density of fog for so long. Inside, laid out neatly, are a stash of high school artefacts, and it’s sheer wonder that knocks Richie breathless. How could he have forgotten all of this? There are items in here that defined them, that bound them as friends, and though they’re still so unfamiliar, Richie’s never felt closer to anyone or anything in his entire recollection of existence. His fingers first find a rock, palm sized and flat, smooth like it’s been worried at by rummaging hands for centuries. He does the same now, his thumb tracing patterns against it’s impenetrable shell. 

“The Barrens,” the word is something intimate on his tongue, something said many times before, very long ago. “Right?”

“I think so.” Eddie says, and takes the rock in his own palm, tests the weight of it.

“We used to go there. We had a rock fight. Is that right?”

“I remembered something similar. So maybe we did, yeah.”

Next, Richie pulls out a collection of pins. He smiles, observing each one before passing them to Eddie individually. “Thundercats, Freese’s, Lost Boys. I have no idea what the Freese’s one is but the other two - I guess we were fans.”

“Maybe we should see Lost Boys next time.” Eddie suggests and Richie’s stomach leaps; next time. 

There’s an empty aspirator that has the words ‘Beware The Spaghetti Man’ scribbled across it, there’s a showercap, white with pink hearts, and there’s some magazine cut outs of Buddy Holly. None of these items strike much recognition in either men, but Eddie does mention that he hasn’t used an inhaler in nearly a decade.  
“When I found this, I instantly went to put it in my mouth.” He adds, and Richie tries to imagine a younger version of him, wheezing and depending on the medicine. His imagination is too stunted to do so. 

They find two year book pages that hold a plethora of precocious, yet somewhat loving messages.

“You still owe me $2 but I can wait.” signed by Ben.

“You’re the coolest out of all of the boys - don’t tell them I said so.” from Beverly.

“Actually, Eddie, you’re entirely wrong about birds and their hygiene. There are such things as bird baths. Read a book.” signed Stan.

“Please stop laughing at Richie. You’re encouraging him. If you stop laughing at Richie, I promise to teach you how to do yoyo tricks. If you decide not to stop laughing at Richie, which I know you probably will, then I’ll probably stop talking to you forever. I’m sorry it had to come to this, because you’re the best, and Richie sucks.” from Bill - Richie reads this one over a few times, beaming, and says after an intermission while it sinks in. “I’m Richie!”

Eddie smiles too, nods, and points to the note on the next page. “This one’s from you.”  
“Eddie. Eds. Spaghetti. I hope things aren’t awkward between us-” his stomach lurches, but is calmed as he reads on. “-seeing as I’m pretty much your step dad now. Don’t call me Dad, please, but definitely do call me Sir. Stay cute. Sir Richie.”

Richie’s quiet once the notes been read, his mouth well and truly done up; his younger self present on these pages has stolen his thunder. He reads it over three or four times, and every re-read engraves deeper in his conscience. The jokes weren’t good, but the affection in them was so baltant that it may as well have been circled in letraset hearts. Eventually, Eddie speaks.

“That’s how I knew it was you. The shitty jokes.”

Richie’s laugh tumbles from a pinned smile. “My jokes have come a long way since this.”

“No, no, they’re just as bad now.”

A beat of quiet, Richie’s fingers curl around the paper.

“You know, it’s weird. I can’t remember the last time I told a ‘your mom’ joke, but the other night, when you stood up and yelled at me from the audience, it was like you triggered something in me and I couldn’t help myself,” he chuckles as his hands find new objects in the box, and he knows that Eddie would just love to be credited for his apparently terrible work, so continues. “Suddenly all these stupid, childish jokes were at the forefront of my brain and they were all I could say. I know you probably hate that, but I really do think you are the reason I gave a good show. I had nothing prepared, it was all improvised.”

“Well, I guess if that’s the case, it was kind of impressive,” Eddie sounds like he’s reluctant to give Richie any kind of comedic ammunition. “The walking stick was funny, I have to admit.”

“I saw you smile when I did it-” a slip of the tongue that, once spilled, pools on their laps. “-all I really wanted was to make you smile.”

And then it’s quiet again, and they’re gazing at each other, both caught in orbs of blue and brown and searching through inner mists of sweet-smelling conflict. They stay caught in their own pocket of time; it’s only them, and for a little while, nothing else matters.

What happens if I’m falling in love with him? Richie thinks, forming the words rustily in his head. What if I can love after all? 

Eddie brings them back into the room by reaching into the shoebox and taking the only photo in there, and holds it for both of them to view. It’s a black and white strip of three shots from a photobooth, and in each frame, a gang of friends pull silly faces. Two boys on the left edge of the group look at him with something of a knowing gaze, and Richie points at them while his chest becomes a torrent of air. “Fuck me - look!”

“I know,” Eddie says, and he nudges his shoulder into Richie’s arm. “It’s us.”

“I wish I could say who the other kids are but, holy fuck, there we are. Look at us!” 

Their youthful faces are carelessly gurning and their young eyes glimmer with all the things Richie is missing - they appear to shine bright with love and joy, magnified through the thick frames that magnify them. Eddie looks just as gleeful as Richie.

“The other kids are the ones from the yearbook, I think,” He points at the girl. “That’s obviously Bev.” his finger travels across the faces as he summons their names, but to Richie, the familiarity of them is enough. He’s struck with a milder sense of familiarity that he had experienced when he found Eddie’s first Tweet. 

“They were our friends.” Richie says with a pensive thoughtfulness. 

“There’s something in this too,” Eddie says, and opens the case of a casette - Nevermind by Nirvana - revealing a scrawled note inside the inner slip, and reads ”You’re gonna need something to shout at while I’m gone. R.”

“So that must mean I left wherever we lived before you.” Richie can’t imagine, with recent revelations in mind, ever wanting to leave Eddie behind. It’s a devastating reality to think that there was a time when he did just that. 

“Maybe that’s why I hate you so much” Eddie puts with subtle jest.

“You still hate me?” Richie asks with similar tone to Eddies, but within feels ice splinter straight through his chest.

Eddie pretends to consider this, and then with a wry smile, puts Richie’s fear to bed. “I’ve moved to sit on the fence about you now.”

The last item in the box is a walkman, and inside is a tape that can’t have owned a box, so stayed hibernating in the machine that brought it to life. Richie presses eject, and out pops the cassette.

“It’s a mixtape.” He says with avidity, and shows Eddie that the tape is customised with their names written across it. “We should listen.”

If there was anything that would reignite their stewing emotions, it would be this - a collection of music, curated for them, and only them. They take an earphone each and press play.

#### 

Head Over Heels

The first chime of the song strikes a segment of his brain, untouched and on stand-by for nearly three decades, and reactivates multiple things previously, yet undetectably, lost to him. It’s like a bolt of lightning ripping through his hippocampus, and with it’s ferocious blitzing, a door is prompted to swing open, and he’s beckoned inside a library of memories. They’re on high shelves and thick with dust, and Richie’s not just excited to uncover them all, but daunted too. How many years worth of life are stashed here, and how much of it would be good? The inevitability of pulling down a bad memory that he’d unconsciously intended on keeping shelved is a fear too great to swallow, so instead of pulling each stashed away moment to the forefront of his brain, he turns his back to the considerable collection, and locks away the precious inventory for gradual unearthment, hopefully, with the assistance of Eddie.  
Beside him, Eddie feels soft, like everything triggered by this song is fond and he's welcoming it. The first line of lyrics gets them both with overwhelming nostalgia, and they both release a trembling sigh:  
_I wanted to be with you alone, and talk about the weather._

“God, of course. We used to listen to this all the time. It was like our song.” Richie says, and though he’s nervous to say it, the words come out so sure.

“I remember that too.” Eddie says, and a moment later he’s caught by his breath forming a rattling ‘wow’. 

Neither can help but to smile as the song guides them through images of their past. A beaten up old car that’s backseats were almost always filled with their friends squashed in, and Eddie and Richie always taking the front seats no matter what. No ‘shotguns’ allowed. An underground bunker - no - a clubhouse, dusty and cobweb ridden but lathered in references that were ingredients of who they were. Posters of movies, bands, comic books strewn across the ground, engravings in the rotten beams that hoisted the place into questionable structural soundness, tapes out of their boxes, boxes without tapes with shattered plastic, and some becoming ash trays to a pile of cigarette butts. A hammock with a sign stapled to one of the beams that held it, reading ‘ten minutes each’ in marker penned capital letters. A bedroom with tartan sheets tangled in a teenage mess, records carefully stashed away in crates, pop culture references cladding every square inch of wall space, a melodica, a 1950’s style microphone for show and a Talkboy for frequent use. All these things, and everywhere were ghosts, dust clouds, of the people that shared the spaces with Richie. Funny how time flies, he thinks, just as the song ends on the same line.

#### 

How Soon Is Now?

The reverb of the opening riff swaps in and out of Richie’s ear, transmits it’s echo to Eddie’s, and with it’s strange distortion offers a hand in connecting them. It whirls them together, shares the music in a way that offers Richie the striking chord, and Eddie it’s reflection. The cry of another guitar makes Richie clench his fists, and he looks down to see Eddie doing the same. The Smiths, it goes without saying, appear to have delivered a sombre tone to the room, unlike it’s heartwarming predecessor.  
“What were we doing listening to The Smiths when we were teenagers?” Richie cracks a joke, of arguably bad taste. “Were we ok?”  
“I think we’ve established that we definitely were not ok, Rich.”  
“I didn’t realise we were ‘The Smiths’ not ok, though. That’s hardcore not ok.”  
"Shut up, Richie! I'm trying to listen."  
Richie does shut up with silent acceptance that this means a lot to Eddie and he respects that, whilst remaining curious as to what memories are dredging up from the depths of Eddie's brain that clearly mean so much.  
The song moves on, remaining much the same, with a wailing melody that prickles Richie’s skin with goosebumps. Eddie’s quiet, and while his mind is on the song - brain power shared with the presence of the man beside him - he breathes at a different pace that Richie feels obligated to match.  
“I think these lyrics resonated with me. I feel like I needed to listen to this, and I need-” Eddie shifts his position, and Richie watches out the corner of his eye to see those dark eyes seal to a close. He continues to wriggle, and then he lies back, head on the mattress and feet on the ground. Richie's core turns to stone, he freezes up, and he's trapped in awkwardness.

_You say it’s gonna happen now, but when exactly do you mean? See, I’ve already waited too long, and all my hope is gone._

“You were running out of patience,” Richie says automatically, the song clueing him into it. “Do you think it was with me?”

“Probably,” Eddie says bluntly. “I think there could be a million timelines in which we exist, and in each and every one, you would always find a way to exasperate me.”

“Maybe it’s my calling.” Richie jokes, and then their joking falls away once more, giving all the space on the airwaves to the song. 

_I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does._

That line hits Richie like a steel toe capped boot to the stomach, winds him, and leaves him to scrabble to air in the motionless vessel that is his body without much hope at all. This was a loaded selection, Eddie meant something by it when he put it on the tape. It meant something to him then, but the tables have turned now, and it’s Richie that’s destitute, alone and loveless. It’s a reality almost too raw to bear, so instead of bearing it, he sits and puts his rambling conscience in limbo, listens to the song free of analysis, and gradually let the stone cast of his body subside.

#### 

Love Will Tear Us Apart

“Jesus,” Richie breathes, but instead of the seriousness that Eddie had listened to the previous song with, he seems to settle into a lower grade level of peace, just as Richie does. “I’m starting to figure out the roots of your angry metal preferences.”

“Yeah," Eddie sits up now, and Richie’s core at last completely relaxes. “I mean, there’s a pattern, right? I obviously wasn’t happy about something. Makes sense that if I wasn’t ok with something when I left, that I’d remain angry but unable to figure out the source of it. I mean, that’s exactly how I’ve always felt. Angry at something, yet nothing, all at once.”

“No, I get it. I mean, I’ve always been unable to work out why I’ve always felt so empty. It feels like missing a mass of nothingness. Does that make sense?”

“No.”

“Sure it does. You’re just not thinking hard enough.”

Love, love will tear us apart, again.

He wonders if that’s what happened.

“Richie?” 

“Hm?”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you, I hope it’s ok to. You know how we met, this second time around?”

“As in, the whole Twitter thing?”

“Yeah. I was just curious. What were you doing searching all the hate people post about you?”

Richie shrugs. He knows why, he’s even hinted at it, but the truth stays hidden within him. “Morbid curiosity, I guess.”

“I don’t know if that really counts as morbid curiosity. That’s like when someone at the office gets sent a gruesome video and you can’t help but look. You know it’ll disturb you but you’re too curious to fight it.”

“Swap the gruesome video for Twitter hate and that’s what I was doing.”

“I know you’re lying. You don’t have to tell me, Rich, but please don’t lie.”

He sounds so concerned, and Richie looks at him to see doe eyes and a tucked bottom lip. He can’t bear worrying him. 

“I used to read hate to give my self-hatred some backbone.”

“Richie…”

“So when you said about giving me a big head, and I said you’d got me wrong…”

“I hate that.”

“Why?”

“No one should feel that way, especially not you.”

The hand that Richie had imagined on his shoulder becomes real, and helps him remember to breathe.

#### 

Love My Way

There’s an audible puff of air from both of them as they find smiles on mouths that had, until now, not known what to do. Eddie’s hand remains on Richie’s shoulder for ten seconds of the song, and when it’s gone, the music seems to become much sadder.

“Bev got us into The Psychedelic Furs.” Richie says, like he knows who he’s talking about for a fleeting moment. 

“Who?” Eddie, understandably asks, and Richie takes the shoebox from in between them to rummage, and finds a strip of photos from a photobooth.  
“Bev.” he says, and his pointer indicates to the face of the pretty girl in the photobooth.

“Of course,” Eddie’s face transformed into an utterly unalloyed smile. “She was an amazing friend. They all were.”

“I wonder where they are now.”

“Considering it’s been such a process getting things right between the two of us, it’s probably best to take baby steps for now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I just think it would be simpler - nicer - if we took our time getting things right before we think about any other people we might have known.”

“Got it,” Richie’s something close to moved by the matter of Eddie wanting to keep this sacred reunion between the two of them for now, and he smiles with crescent shaped lips as he agrees. “Just you and me.”

#### 

Running Up That Hill

They both seem to go rigid, their muscles seizing, their spines becoming iron rods. Though they’re the opposite of relaxed, their waking rigor mortis is not of unpleasant origin. It’s this song; it’s heavy drums, it’s endless melodic echo, it’s hauntingly, intimately, and familiar tune, that turns their aging bodies to stone while their minds seem to properly regress to the time before they forgot it all.  
"I remember - you got that car,” Eddie husks, his voice trapped beneath the layers of purple, dreamy fog created by the music. Richie has to light a torch to see through it, to pick Eddie out, and it’s confounding to discover him as physical, and existing outside the dreamscape that’s spun so effortlessly by the sounds in their ears. “-that shitty rust bucket of a car and I made you a mixtape, well, us a mixtape - this mixtape - for the first time you picked me up for a drive… we listened to it so loud the speakers blew on the passenger's side, and then this came on and I had the perfect excuse to…" Eddie smiles, but also, he's shaking and Richie sees how his nervous hands knit together in his lap, "it was raining, and the speakers were fucked, so that was why I leaned my head on your shoulder as you drove. So I could hear this song better through the rain. Except I remember, that wasn't the only reason why I leaned my head on your shoulder."

"I think," Richie doesn't think, he knows, the memory is like a match in a power cut. "I remember that. I think - you had a knack with fixing up cars, didn't you? I could have asked you to fix the speaker but I didn't want to. I remember that feeling, being torn between wanting functioning speakers whilst knowing that if it was fixed, we'd be without that excuse and-" Richie pauses, a watery smile simmering in his eyes. "We needed excuses."

"I never offered to fix it for the very same reason, Rich." 

They share a quiet laugh, tinged with embarrassment, bashfulness. Richie’s heart went into hiatus some moments ago; he finds, quite curiously, that he doesn’t need it.

"I haven't listened to this album since the late 90s, maybe. It made me sad." Richie says, and his fingers trace Kate's hair on the picture stuck to the inside of the shoebox, the album cover of Hounds Of Love; he thanks her silently for giving them this moment. 

"Why sad?" Eddie asks - like he needs to. Richie can’t fight the sorrowful, self-pitying laugh that bleeds through a gap in his teeth.

"I knew something was missing, I guess."

_You and me. That was us, _Richie thinks,_you and me. Me and him. Richie and Eddie._

_Come on baby, come on darling, let me steal this moment from you now._

They don’t realise how close they’re sitting until this line. Eddie breaks free from the concrete hold of his body.

“Rich, can I,” he has to clear his throat to finish the question, but it’s more than a froggy throat that strives to prevent it from being asked. “Can I try something?”

How can Richie answer that with words? He can’t - it’s that simple. He can barely nod, but somehow, manages a stinted shake of his head.

Eddie moves, like he said he was going to, but it still manages to rumble thunder in Richie's chest like a warning of imminent panic. Eddie's taken out his ear bud and stood up, and Richie can't watch because he's nervous - at least that's what he thinks he is - and his eyes fight against a panicked flight around the room and stay cemented to his lap. He might have looked up once, just briefly, and caught a glimpse of Eddie's silhouette as he passes in front of him, bathed in silver ribbons of moonlight. He doesn't go far, not at all, he's simply moved to sit on Richie's right hand side, and he's put the earbud back - now the lead from the earphones loops around them, their heads in the centre, Richie with the left, and Eddie with the right. How it would have been in that rusty old car with it’s blown passenger side speaker. The only thing different changes now, as Eddie very carefully lowers his cheek to rest on Richie’s shoulder.

This is how it always was.

They listen like this furthermore, and both their hearts rival the furious beat of the songs.

When the song is over, they remain in place, and Richie is set in a mould of both content and fear. Eddie lifts his head at last, and Richie unconsciously pivots to face him. They’re so close, almost as if they were pulled together by a gravitational pull - when did they get this close? Richie’s eyes take a natural course down to Eddie’s lips, which are parted, and pant with the same rapid and shallow motion that Richie feels knocking inside his skull. When he looks up, he finds that Eddie’s looking at Richie’s lips, and he hasn’t looked away yet.

“Eddie…” Richie whispers, and that brings Eddie’s focus back. They lock vision again, and they teeter on the edge of this moment.  
Then they’re leaning in, edging ever closer, and when their breath meets, it’s a heat wave for them both to bask in. Both their eyes now closed, they trust the inevitable journey that their mouths will make. They nearly seal the space between them, but Eddie pulls back, only a little, and he whispers exactly what Richie’s thinking: “I don’t- I don’t know if this is right.”

“It could be very wrong.” Richie returns, but their lips stay inches apart.

“It could be.” Eddie’s edging in again.

“But it might be right.” Richie’s moved his hand to Eddie’s cheek. He soothes away the worry lines he can feel denting the corners of Eddie’s eyes.

“I hope it is.” Eddie’s hand finds Richie’s waist, and holds his t-shirt tight.

They take the chance. Richie presses his lips to Eddie’s, and with rattling breaths escaping through the gaps, their kiss is instantly corrected. They kiss slowly, unsurely, but it feels like memory muscle. We’ve done this before, Richie thinks, we were right. He can’t tell if Eddie’s thinking the same thing, but if his actions are anything to go by, he’d say he’s almost definitely sure. It’s Eddie that makes their kiss deeper, and Eddie that guides Richie back to lie on the bed, and Eddie that hovers above Richie as he places ghost-like kisses to a surface of skin that has felt them before, and missed them terribly. 

“Is this ok?” Eddie asks between his kisses, and Richie says it is, and thinks that ‘ok’ is understatement. Kissing Eddie, it appears, is something he’d forgotten how to do. He reminds himself through the rest of the night.


	11. The Life & Times of Richie Tozier (pt. 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for mental breakdown, depression, anxiety. please read with caution if you are sensitive to angst, x

They were gentle with each other through the night. With each movement came a request for reassurance, and reassurance was granted by way of lingering kisses like whispers against each other’s skin. Richie had wanted to take in the heavenly sight of Eddie above him, wanted to watch the way the moonlight rippled its way across his body, but had found the act of keeping his eyes open quite the task. When they had lifted each other’s shirts over their heads, Richie had been a victim of his attraction to the other man, and had shied away with his arms crossing over his chest. Eddie had only taken each hand and gave them placement on his shoulder blades, grazed his fingertips over Richie’s abdomen, and followed the pattern they made with his lips. A storm rolled in and a lightning bolt split the humid night, but it was nothing but a dim spark compared to the electricity coursing through their lovers bed.

The morning comes, and Richie stirs from his hour of sleep to the glorious reality of Eddie lying next to him, and they are exactly how he'd left them; linked limbs, skin on skin, holding one another in a tentative yet impassioned embrace. 

Richie breathes through a smile that's still dusted with sleep dust, and his hands begin to travel the landscape of Eddie's chest. His eyes, unaided, must trust what his fingers find. Eddie's real, and holding him.

If he'd have paid closer attention he would have felt the indication of an issue. Eddie's muscles are sown tight with tension, but Richie's hands are gullible and absorb the basic facts of a bare chest, leaving the rigidity of those muscles undetected beneath his skin.

"This is weird," Richie breathes out, and though he's tense, Eddie turns his head to Richie's voice. "I think I've had about an hour of sleep but I've never felt so awake." He's never felt so alive, is what he really means. 

"I didn't get any sleep." Eddie answers stiffly. 

Richie's still naive, and his palm rests flat against Eddie's chest; the rhythm of Eddie's heart beat syncopates with Richie's pulse. "I'm sorry. Couldn't you get comfortable?" Richie asks. 

"No, it wasn't that." Still blunt, though his hand moves to rest over Richie's that lays over his heart. Richie feels it's warmth but notices a timidness in the movement. 

He knows the reason why Eddie struggled to sleep, but saying it out loud would shatter this beautiful moment that already balances on the air with overt fragility.  
It's now that he senses those tightly sown muscles; Eddie holds the needle while Richie scrambles to unpick the stitches, though he'll never be quick enough. 

Still, he says it. If only to fill the silence. "This is complicated," he mutters, and feels the need to hold Eddie tighter, like he's foreseen the other man's departure from his embrace. "We have a lot to work out."

"We don't." Eddie says, clipped, and it nips at Richie's ears with a coldness, a finality. Lovestruck and dumb with it, he picks hope out of Eddie's words.

"You sound...sure about that." He says, posing it as a comment rather than a question. He doesn't want to open unnecessary doors; he knows their latches would promptly break before the doors could be shut again. 

Eddie says nothing. 

Richie waits for something.

Eddie gives him that, and leaves the bed, and Richie cold. 

"Is everything ok?" Richie asks with panic, and he sits up finds his glasses, and stays there while Eddie finds his clothes and dresses. 

"Obviously not, Richie-" Eddie's poised on the verge of an outburst, Richie can tell. He waits for it, and Eddie gets fully dressed before his pot boils over. "This is a lot. Like, we knew it - this whole thing with us remembering our past - we knew it was gonna be a lot to process but I don't think either of us could have predicted where last night ended. And I think we made a mistake. I think we-" his breathing is shallow and his hands are in frenetic motions of patting down his pockets as they search for an aid that left those pockets years ago. Richie feels heat rising up his neck, and his imagination plays out a scene in which he finds Eddie's aspirator for him, puts it in his mouth, and helps him press the button. The imaginary version of himself is far bolder than the physical counterpart, which is failing even to move at all. "-I think we got it wrong."

Everything inside him shatters. Richie attempts to swallow, but it shifts through his closing throat as a choke. The masochist inside him jeers with swarming ‘I told you so’s’ while the rest of him weeps in disbelief; his exterior sits up straight and is a picture of hurt. “I don’t think that’s true.” He manages, his voice a feeble wind that could never penetrate Eddie’s stubborn walls. 

“We were blinded and deafened by nostalgia,” Eddie is picking bricks from the walls and hurling them straight at Richie’s head. “That’s all it was. And now everything is fucked. I’m a cheater and a fuck up and I’m not-”

“-not gay?” Richie actually laughs, and it freezes his breath. Everything inside him stays hot and simmering. “I’m not either.”

“Right.” Eddie turns his back to him, and Richie slides from his cacoon of covers. He finds his discarded pyjamas and covers up; it’s like he’s ashamed, hiding himself and blanketing everything Eddie had uncovered, taking it all back and locking it away again. Though he manages a little bravery, and moves to Eddie with an outstretched arm. The hand that he places on Eddie’s shoulder is briskly shrugged off, as Eddie spits “don’t touch me.”

So Richie shrinks back, the bravery he had found is fatally wounded. He says something, but it’s not much. “I don’t understand what’s changed.”

Eddie turns, all soft edges that he’d shown last night now sharp and polished. “Nothing’s changed. I wasn’t gay last night, I’m not gay now. I was married last night, I’m still married now. I hated you last night, and I hate you now. The only change is that I hate you more now than I did yesterday.”

Richie’s not sure how many blows he can take by this point. Everything hurts more with every second that passes. “Last night you said that you didn’t hate me.”

“Like I said, I was fooled by all that nostalgia,” Eddie’s taken his eyes away from Richie to look at the floor, his jaw is clenched impossibly tight, and when those dark eyes find Richie once more, there’s nothing but blackness and coldness left. “You might have meant something to me once, Richie. But you mean nothing to me now.”

Richie takes a deep breath and summons everything he can, recognising how desperate he is to fight for Eddie and to prove that everything they suspected last night is true. “Eddie, I get that you’re confused and guilty about your wife and everything but- fuck, I’m confused too. I don’t know what all of this means but I’m not giving up on it. There’s been so much of me missing in the life that I remember; finding you made me feel the closest thing to complete that I’ve ever felt,” He takes a bold step closer and notices Eddie begin to recoil in defeat. “I don’t think you mean what you’re saying. Eddie, you mean so much to me and I’m scared of that. I’m scared of how much you mean to me. You seriously think that we’ve just been tricked by those things in that shoebox, when I can honestly say that letting you leave me, out of fear for ruining your life as a fucking lapdog, would be my biggest regret?”

He’s unwittingly stoked Eddie’s fire. Eddie steps forward, fists clenched, mouth ironed out with aggravation. “You think I’m a lapdog?” He asks, and something in him has changed. He’s teeming with this furious energy that burns Richie’s skin as Eddie comes closer. Richie’s breath hitches in his throat, and then completes its journey out of his mouth in time to collide with Eddie’s. There’s hot air in the miniscule space between them, and a tension so tangible it might have had the force to smash their bodies together and cease this arguing for good. 

Something within Richie grapples to go back on his word, to deny his meaning by it, to be snivelling and weak in the face of argument. But that something loses to the somewhat delicious temptation of a challenge. 

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” he says flatly with this newfound defiance. His neck is tilting his chin down, his shoulders are hunched, and Eddie’s chin is inclined making them so close. Their lungs continue to pump heated air that merges on the middle ground. Neither of them speak. 

He’s either going to kiss me or kill me, Richie thinks, but stays where he is with the resolution of taking his chances.  
He thinks it might be the latter. Eddie cranes his neck a little more, and from this close, Richie can see the details of the denting frown line that draw a shadow across Eddie’s eyes that have remained fixed and unblinking for what feels like hours. 

“I am not a fucking lapdog.” Eddie snarls, and Richie’s reply falls from his mouth like a desperate, clumsy beg.

“Prove it.”

Eddie kisses him. It’s a hard kiss, remiss of the delicate passion that they had pressed gently into each other’s mouths the night before. His fingers are on Richie’s hip bones digging into his skin and leaving crescent shaped white marks behind. A moan slips over Richie’s tongue as his hands clutch Eddie’s t-shirt, and he obeys as Eddie pushes him back to the bed. Eddie straddles Richie’s lap, and wordlessly, Richie begs for Eddie to give him everything. He pulls at Eddie’s t-shirt, tries to tug it from him, but Eddie takes his arms and twists them above Richie’s head, forcing him onto his back and pinning him down with his grip around his wrists. He bends to continue their kiss which is softer now, until Eddie’s teeth are nipping at Richie’s bottom lip. For a moment, Richie expects for Eddie’s mouth to leave his, for Eddie’s kisses to trail across his jaw, down his neck, to fall further down his body. He recognises this as wishful thinking when Eddie’s mouth does leave his, but doesn’t replace it’s contact anywhere else, and leaves him all together. 

It takes a moment for Richie to snap out of it, and when he does, Eddie’s moving for the door. Richie scrambles to his feet, reaching for the other man and cries out. “Eddie, wait!”

He wastes his breath.

After Eddie’s gone, Richie stands where Eddie left him, gormless, pathetic, hands weaved together like an empty basket held at his abdomen. He doesn’t know what to think - no, he doesn’t know how to think. Eddie emptied out the buckets full of thoughts and feelings and newfound sentiment that Richie had stored up with the unknown knowledge of it all being for Eddie. Eddie took it all and left him empty. He was a fool to think that childhood love could be revived after an adult life’s worth of malnourishment. 

Richie’s glasses make it all too clear; with the lethargic roll of his eyes across the room, he can see everything perfectly, as it is. Empty, like him. A door slammed shut, a bed unmade and gone cold, a shoebox of memories scattered. His body operates, though it’s numb and not controlled by his brain, and automatically it moves through the abandoned space to make the bed, to lock the door, to collect the artifacts and shut them away again. Back in the box, where they should have been kept. He doesn’t linger on the items, barely gives them a look, hardy spares them a thought. The signed aspirator goes in first, the photobooth photo next, then the rock, the pins, the yearbook pages. The only item that his fingers fight the release of, is the Walkman, which was the item that had triggered it all last night. His thumb presses eject and the tape deck springs open, offering the heart inside, the custom mix that teenaged Eddie had crafted. They’d only got through the first side, so hadn’t ejected the tape at all, until Richie does now by himself. It’s scribbled all over, covered in doodles, and the label says “for E. Kaspbrak and R. Tozier only!”, while red love hearts modestly skirt close to the text. He traces the shapes with his finger tips, and he only means to make those innocent movements. The vitriol of what they do next is powered by overspilling bitterness that he simply cannot control. They flip over the tape and find the foily strip wound tight, exposed on the cassette’s underside, and tug. He’s the executioner that draws out the inners of the tape, and he doesn’t even mean to be. He tosses it with it’s spilled out guts to the shoebox, and then kicks the box across the room. 

Now he’s in front of the mirror and he hates what he sees. A body bruised by mistakenly made kisses, a set of eyes blinded by a sun, a mouth with nothing left to say. Absent-minded hands creep to greying follicles, but are swatted before the first damning tug. Instead, their bitten fingernails find the permanent wrinkles between his brows, the forking dents around his eyes, the dimpled tracks running parallel across his forehead. Pamela gets injections, he thinks with unintentional vanity (powered by self deprecating paranoia), Pamela stopped aging at 40. Digits dig into the corners of his open mouth, keeping his lips pulled apart so to observe the teeth that could be whiter, could be straighter. The receding gums that should have been better cared for, that curl against excuses - he could always afford decent dentistry. Back to his eyes, bloodshot, iris's now much more grey than their once oceanic blue, and pathetic behind the glasses that he tears from his face with resentment. Why would he want to see himself in high definition when the power of sight would only spotlight the things he hates? With smudged vision he blots at his frown lines, erases the dappled age and goes back to the things he can control, only to curse himself for the way he has failed there too. His clothes are shambolic, and yes, they’re pyjamas that he’s in now, but the line of moth-eaten holes along the neck of his once white t-shirt reminds him of his wardrobe of similarly disheveled clothes that he could afford to replace. Could afford a thousand times over, in fact, and yet he finds the same old shit to throw on blindly. Fred always looks so sharp, he thinks, Fred takes care of himself better than I ever could. He accepts with a new dash of self hatred while placing himself in juxtaposition with Fred, that he’ll simply never be able to take care of himself; period. Then his mind wanders back to Eddie, to the perfect hands, the high standards, the cared for physique. Eddie is perfect, and his perfection exceeds Richie's own opinion. The self hatred seeds and spreads like wildfire until he's repeating it's venom like an incantation; you disgust me and you deserve nothing but his hatred. 

His phone rings.

"Fuck-" he hears it in the other room and it makes him jump, he scurries to it. It's Fred. "Fuck." He doesn't want to answer but he's sure that he promised he always would. He can't remember when he made that promise, but he always does his best to be true to his word. 

Trapped in his head, he doesn't make it in time. The phone rings off and he's stuck staring at it's blank screen. The cracks of glass seem more splintered today, like if Richie were to type out a text he'd get microscopic shards slicing his fingerprints to a point that made them unrecognisable and not his anymore. The fractured phone screen mimics his shattering heart; funny how that this device is how it all started. 

Fred calls again, and Richie slices his finger against the broken surface.

“Hey,” he breathes out, his voice husky, tired out from overuse, and rusted from the early retirement. He’s speaking automatically - there’s no care to his words. “You ok?”

“I’m good. What’s up with you?”

What’s up with me, an echo of Fred’s question bounces through his hollow skull, and with it he stifles a laugh; I wish I knew. 

“Nothing much.” He lies.

“You sure?” Fred is clearly on high alert, clearly recognises the shallow depth to Richie’s voice that skims the surface of truth instead of delving in. This man knows me well, Richie thinks, and I treat him like a stranger. 

He wants to lie, wants to pretend that nothing at all is up with him, that everything is utterly normal and he’s exactly the showstopping performer that his adoring manager pushes him to be - but he’s not capable of lying. Richie’s just recognising this now as he looks across the room and sees his reflection again; you could clad him in ruffles and bows, tie strings to his limbs, plaster his greying cheeks in white makeup and his downturned lips in a gravity defying lash of red, and he’d become the perfect puppeteered entertainer. That’s not me, his conscience whispers, I can’t be the version of myself meant to stand in the spotlight and put on a show. Not tonight. Maybe not ever again. 

He voices as much as he can, but it falls from behind chattering teeth as a simple “no.”

Fred says Richie’s name too many times for Richie to count, each time it bounces against his eardrums with a strange timbre, hollow and tinny. 

“Richie, what’s wrong?” Fred’s saying, his voice raising with palpable panic. “Talk to me, buddy.”

“I…” Richie croaks, and something slides down his cheek, warm and wet. When it reaches his mouth, it’s salty, and there’s more of it than he thought. He sniffs and wipes at the tears as he does his best to fathom his words. “I think I might have a broken heart, Fred.”

Fred doesn’t speak for a moment, instead giving respectful quiet to Richie’s revelation. Richie moves into the opening with a sudden urge to spill it all. 

“I think this was just the tip of the iceberg, though. It just needed one final kick to totally clap out, and now-” he clutches his palm over the pathetically pulsing thing in his chest; it’s there, despite it’s weak beats, and it makes its presence known through clenching pain. “-It hurts. It hurts so much. Why does it hurt so fucking much?”

Fred breathes a whistling breath through his nose, and it hisses through the phone line for Richie to grip to as something tangible, while everything else around him breaks apart, himself included. “You’ve not been ok for a long time, Richie,” Fred mutters, the sympathy in his voice coming through as something Richie can hold to with reassurance. “I’ve been waiting for you to tell me yourself. I mean, I’ve been waiting for you to recognise it, and to be ready to do so.”

“I don’t think I’m ready.” It sounds so desperate that Richie looks to the mirror again to observe if the vessel from which the words came looks as pathetic as the words released. 

“That’s ok. If you don’t think you’re ready, then you’re not ready. You’ll get there,” Fred says earnestly, and Richie sobs. “You don’t have to do it alone, Richie.”

“I am alone.”

Fred sighs. “It might feel like that, but believe me, you’re not.”

“It hurts-”

“-I know.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, I’m here. Whether you know or not.”

“I know,” Richie manages to smile. “I can’t fault you for that.”

“I hope there’s not much else you can fault me for,” Fred’s voice is a chuckle; Richie feels it touch the down turned corners of his mouth, and they find a higher place on his cheeks. Fred goes on, though, and Richie’s stomach flips. “I don’t want to turn this around to business, but what do you want to do about tonight?”

Richie honestly doesn’t know. He doubts his ability to do a good show in the way that he is now, and knows that Eddie’s absence in the audience will only damn the performance he’s capable of giving. But the consequences of missing a show that would go on without him are great; somehow, things would be simpler if it was his show and his alone. He doesn’t know the implications of missing the show, but feels daunted to ask, so he takes a deep breath and writes his name on his own execution certificate. 

“I want to do it.” The capability of lying returns in full force.

Fred sounds naturally surprised. “Seriously? Are you sure?”

Richie’s not sure. “I’m sure.” he says defiantly. “Eddie won’t be there, though.”

“Eddie? Is he the guy we planted in the audience?” Fred asks, and then he can’t hide his unfortunate lightbulb moment. “Is he-?” Richie knows what the question was going to be, and is eternally grateful that Fred knows when to stop himself.

“He can’t make it tonight.” Richie simply says.

“Well, I can sit in his seat and shout all the stuff he’s been shouting. Would that help?”

A sorrowful smile lapses Richie’s features. “Sure.”

#### 

Saturday 23rd July - The Night That Richie Chokes

This is bound to be a mistake. Richie can feel the threat of it already going stale in his stomach, and he waits alone on the side of the stage as Lester Ronson recites his perfected routine. Richie tries to run through his own routine, but there’s nothing left in his head. Just ominously forming storm clouds that he cannot look past. That’s right - there was no real routine. The first night set the trend of the shows to follow, and the first night’s spiel was triggered by a heckler. Not just any heckler, but Eddie. And Richie had felt that surge of naturally comedic talent enter his veins and he had, for maybe a moment, thought himself as authentically funny. Like it was simply in his blood, and that until that night, he had been faking it. He cursed the matter of tonight; he’s back at square one, faking it again, but he’s really not sure how well he can pull it off. His hands are clammy, his head is swimming, his stomach feels empty and roars with it’s emptiness. 

When his name is announced, he has to pull his legs from an invisible bog to move onto the stage. He manages to wave, and successfully make it to the microphone. 

On queue, Fred shouts Eddie’s first ‘line’: “Asshole!”

Richie blinks into the lights overhead, making his vision blot out, and in this haze he only sees smudges of what must be presumed as heads. Heads of fans, eagerly awaiting for their money’s worth. That’s just it, isn’t it? They’ve paid good money to be here and they want him to perform for them. He’s just a wind up dolly with broken legs and a smashed up face - how long would it be until he gets tossed into the rubbish pile, and they find a new disposable entertainer? After tonight, maybe not long at all. 

He searches their faces and they wait, and he’s managed to bridge an awkward silence that rises between them like steam off of tepid water. He breathes it in, and he spells it out, and the silence evaporates into whispers and mutters and chuckles and sneers. 

His eyes find Fred who’s gnawing at his bottom lip like it’s a meal. He nods with encouragement, he’s trying to egg Richie on, he even opens his mouth to try the heckle again. But Richie stops him with a short, sharp “don’t.”

Freds mouth slams shut. Instead of speaking out loud, he speaks with body language that Richie dejects. Fred sinks into his seat, his eyebrows slanting in paranoia, and Richie takes the microphone.

“You’re all here for a show, right?” A nervous, unsure cheer from the audience. “Well if it wasn’t already perfectly obvious, you’re not getting that from me. I can’t-” he gets stuck and stumbles over his tongue. He knows what he means to say, and there’s a chaotic rant brewing in his stomach which was, previously, the source of the roaring noise. It was never empty, after all. The rant is vicious and swarming and it’s sending him a warcry, but he physically cannot launch it. “Stop using me, I’m broken”. Instead, what comes out is a soliloquy meant only for two sets of ears. 

“I should never have let you sit in that seat, Fred.” He sees Fred’s eyes widen, and a few heads around him turn to look at the man in the seat. 

"I’m sorry. I should have said that sooner, I know, but then I should have probably waited a bit longer with it, too. Just like me, I guess. Anyway, what I’m getting at is this:” he takes a deep breath, lets out a shaky sigh, and locks his eyes on the man so deserving of these words. “I’ve been sitting you in his seat for far too long, and that wasn’t fair. Not at all. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I do now. I’m sorry, Fred. I never meant to turn you into a substitute.” 

Fred watches flabbergasted, just like the rest of the people around him, as Richie drops the microphone and steps off stage for good.

* * *

He expected his phone to go haywire that night, but not one phone call came in. He’s feeling tetchy, on edge, and his loneliness is amplified by his desire to be noticed in some way, shape, or form. Perhaps if Fred were to call now, they could patch things up and talk about a new venture, or they could discuss a comeback, or formulate a way to stitch Richie back into the hearts of the nation. Maybe if he begged for forgiveness, Fred would give it, and they would be able to relay a path to a second wind of success. He’s trapped in a whirlwind of what ifs, and a multitude of maybes and his head feels like it’s empty which only makes the thoughts rattle louder. He checks his heart - it’s incessantly beating. He homes in on his breathing - it’s not reaching the right places, coming to a shallow end. 

Fuck. What have I done?

It’s no wonder that he ends up in an off licence. Neon lights twist and reflect against his lenses and he stands at the counter tapping his fingers on its surface. He has to keep moving in some way - the fidgeting reminds him that he’s alive. Like that’s a good thing.

He asks for everything on the shelf, the shop assistant loads a plastic bag with wide eyes that won’t stop fucking staring.

“Aren’t you-?”

“Yes. Yep. Trashmouth Tozier.” He answers quicker than her accusation airs. He keeps one word reserved in his mouth, spits it around his head for his own bitter tasting. Apparently. 

She pulls a snooty face, judgemental, but how can anyone blame her. She asks for $78. He shoves a crumpled up pile amounting to $120 and tells her to keep the change. He’ll say anything, do anything, to change that expression of hers - it suddenly matters the world to him. He just ripped his heart out on stage in front of a few thousand people, and yet it is this solitary shop assistant whose opinion of him is haunting. 

“I’m having a party.” He says as he takes his poison from her, and she puts her thumb up. He does the same, and outside, he tears himself up about that too. 

His room is how he left it. A big unmade bed, in a big, soulless box. Big, yawning windows, staring at a big, lonely city. He hates it - at least now he has the slick company of alcohol. He wonders how many sips will make him numb. He wonders if he’s already past obtaining stupefaction. 

He puts it to the test.

* * *

A quarter of a bottle of vodka sunk, and his fingers are curling around his phone. Inevitably, it’s both a weapon and a lifeline. He doesn't realise until it's done, the numbers dialled, and the answer phone beeps. He panics, and says his piece.

“Hey, Eddie? I didn’t expect you to pick up. I wouldn’t blame you if you decided never to pick up the phone to me again. I don’t think I would, if I were you. Anyway, I wanted to say before you see it all on Twitter - well, actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were boycotting Twitter, too. That would be smart of you, and you are pretty smart. But in case you do decide to go on Twitter, I want you to hear it from me first. I fucked up on stage tonight. Pretty bad, I think. Now that I’m trying to think about it, I can’t remember what it was exactly I said but, uh-” He swallows, and his blurry brain tries to map out the distance that the phone line is stretching to. He accepts with resentment that he doesn’t even know the distance. He doesn’t know where Eddie is. “-all I know is that I was hurting really bad, and I still am. And it’s because of you. Not- not like it’s your fault but...I guess, I’m hurting as bad as I am because I can’t have you. And I want you. I want you so bad it’s killing me. And I understand that you can’t give yourself to me because you made yourself a life without me, but I never did that. I never lived, never found a way to live - at least not properly. Does that make sense?” He laughs, and following the laugh is a sniff, and it’s then that he notices the sensation of tears trailing down his cheeks. He’s crying for the second time today. Pathetic. “I- I never knew life without you, but your brief reappearance made me remember, so I want to say thank you, really. Thank you, but no thank you. I don’t want to know life if it hurts as much as this. It’s unbearable-” He’s interrupted by a beeping tone, and he pulls the phone away from his ear, and his heart lurches when he sees who’s calling. At least, he thinks, it’s still capable of beating. “-you’re calling me. I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know how to delete this. Fuck.”

He manages to hang up one call and answer the other. 

“I just left you a message. Please don’t listen to it.” Is how he answers.

On the other end, Richie’s pleasantly surprised to hear Eddie laugh. He clings to the noise like it’s the first blackbird’s song of Spring. 

“I probably will listen. You know that, right?” Eddie says, with what could be mistaken as a teasing tone. 

“Yeah. I would too.” Richie says, and manages to mask his slurring.

Then there’s silence.

Richie’s far too focused on his breathing, his pulse that thumps in his ears, and his desire to ditch this callous way of communicating and be with Eddie face to face. He’s so focused on all of that, that when Eddie speaks, he has to retrain his hearing - such a process would be an easy thing to do, if it weren’t for the brewing dread that hooks onto the phone line. 

“I missed- sorry - can you start over? I was-”

“-God damnit, Rich, are you drunk?”

Richie doesn’t want to answer that, so he doesn’t. Eventually he says with a childlike naivety, “please can you start again?”

“It’s a lot. Can I just come to your room?”

Richie’s heart stops. He wants to say yes, but as he looks upon the mess of the room, the shoebox that had been carelessly kicked across the floor, the tape unreeled, and not to mention the bottles of alcohol, he tells himself that saying yes would not be wise.

He has to let Eddie down gently; his explanation for decline blanches and boils over as an impatient plead. 

“What is it, Eddie?”

Eddie sighs, and Richie knows he’s won this time. 

“I’m sorry about this morning. I was an asshole.”

Richie lets out a breath that he’s held for longer than he can recollect. “Is that it?”

“Oh, thanks for calling to apologise Eddie, I really appreciate it. What the fuck do you mean, is that it?!”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that in my head, you’re already forgiven so it’s really no big deal.”

“I shouldn’t be. I mean it. It was a dickish way to behave.”

“Well, it’s fine. I get why you were like that. This whole thing is-” he pauses to sigh, but a puff of liquor scented fumes is all that comes out. “-it’s fucked.”

“So, that’s why I’m calling. It got more fucked but-" Eddie's words are so slow and meticulous that Richie finds himself tumbling over himself in haste to discover the nature of the call. He wants it quickly, but Eddie takes his time. "-I haven’t decided if it’s good or bad yet. Either way, I’m fucking confused, man.”

“Eddie,” Richie’s lungs swell to bursting point. “Tell me.” 

He’s so desperate to hear something that his imagination conjures up a multitude of scenarios in which Eddie tells him a variety of things, all of which are so left-field and incoherent that he bats them off as irrational almost instantly and very nearly misses the truly spoken words on the other end of the phone.

Eddie stutters it, a nervous throat closing over and attempting to hide it’s secrets, but he definitely says it. 

“I loved you.”

Richie stops whatever mechanical motion his body is in the sways of. He stops dead. Miles away, Eddie does too.

“I did- I was head over heels in love with you, Richie.” Eddie’s voice is small, Richie yearns to reach through the airwaves and help it go on. 

“How do you know that?” He asks, partially through confusion, partially through the maddening itch that curiosity has over him. “You said- you said that we got it wrong.”

“I know. I know I said that but, well, that was wrong. We were right. I mean, listen Rich, that doesn’t make what we did last night right. The thing itself was wrong but the feeling, on my end anyway, was entirely right.”

Richie doesn’t speak, but with a mouth agape, blinks to let a teardrop skim his cheek.

“I, uh, I found some letters. Addressed to you, except with no postal address. Just with your name on, still sealed.”

“What did they say?” Richie manages to croak. “Read them to me.”

“I don’t- that’s why I wanted to come to you. So you could read them yourself.”

“No. Read them to me.” He’s got this horrible feeling inside him that restricts him from going back on letting Eddie come to his room, as much as he dreadfully wants that. “Please, Eddie.”

Eddie’s sigh is shaky, but it tells Richie that he’s given in. Eddie clears his throat, and Richie tilts his head back to rest on the edge of the bed, and folds up his knees, close to his chest. 

“The first one is dated 17th May 1995.” He clears his throat again, and Richie pushes his back firmer against the bed, seeking comfort in this moment of uncertainty. The letter reads:

> Richie
> 
> I know you’ve only been gone for two hours but by the time you get this, you would have been gone much longer. Is it dumb that I miss you already? Oh. I’m going to have to wait ages to get a reply to that question. I’ll answer it for myself then. No, Eddie, it’s not dumb to miss Richie, but Richie is dumb, so technically, missing a dumb person is dumb in itself, and if we were to delve deeper into that dumbness you might also say that it is dumb of you to feel the way you do about someone so dumb. So with all those variables taken into account we conclude that yes, you are dumb - but you’re dumb for Richie Tozier, and if that makes you happy then it’s really not dumb at all. 
> 
> I’m very dumb for you, Richie, but you already know that.
> 
> Can’t wait to talk to you.
> 
> Love from Eddie.

“That was adorable.” Richie says through a choked laugh, the rest of him in some sluggish state of disbelief that Eddie Kaspbrak is on the other end of the phone reading him love letters from their teenage years.

“Yeah, that one’s pretty cute.” He moves to the next - dated June 6th 1995- with a rustle of torn open envelopes.

> Hey Rich,
> 
> I don’t know why I’m writing this like I’m going to get a reply when I don’t even know where to send it. I also don’t know why I haven’t heard from you since you left, especially because you promised you would call me as soon as you got to your new house and the phone lines were connected or whatever. I’m worried. I hope you’re ok. The others haven’t heard from you either, so I know I’m not the reason you’ve gone quiet. I did think that, initially. Like, what if he’s changed his mind about me, or what if he’s found someone that doesn’t shout at him or get angry at his jokes. I hope you know that whenever I do snap at your jokes, I’m just - well, I don’t know why I snap, because I love your jokes. You’re the funniest person I have ever met, or could ever wish to know. No one, no matter how hard they try, will make me laugh quite like you do. That’s the only time I am ever going to say that because I don’t want it going to your head. Well, hopefully you’ll get to see this letter, otherwise I’ll never tell you that your jokes are funny, and you will live the rest of your life (I hope) tormenting over the fact that, despite your self-proclaimed ‘funny bones’, you never once made your own boyfriend laugh.
> 
> Please call me, Richie. I’m so sad without you.

“Boyfriend.” Richie says, the word resting a familiar light weight on his tongue, but one that feels as rare as phoenix feathers.

“Boyfriend.” Eddie repeats, and in his voice, the word sounds so right. Like it was made only for Eddie’s mouth, and uttered only to Richie’s ears. 

“This is crazy.” Richie whispers, his eyes closing over. He takes his glasses off, and he rubs the heel of his hand over his eyelids, causing flashes of red in their darkness.

“I know. But there’s more, and the last one isn’t so sweet.”

Richie takes a blow to his stomach as Eddie reads the final letter.

> Richie.
> 
> This letter is not for you, because you’d never get it anyway. This letter is for me, and I am writing it to you because these words are very much ones I’d like to say to you, but now, probably never will. No, in fact, I definitely never will. 
> 
> Now that I’m writing, actually, I don’t know where to start. I guess with the obvious. 
> 
> I really fucking loved you, Richie, and I thought you loved me too. I loved you so much that I would have done anything to keep that love good, and keep ‘us’. I wanted ‘us’ so bad, but deep down I think I’d never get ‘us’. Not completely. There was always something in the way of our happy ending, but I never knew what. Now I do. It’s you fucking off to another State and leaving me behind in this hellhole, and forgetting to even call me. I knew it. I fucking knew it was going to happen one day, that we would crash and burn, I just didn’t think it would be so soon. I thought, with everything we’ve been through together, that we’d be pull through and be each other’s rock until we were both on our feet and bound for better lives outside of Derry. I thought you’d be there for me, like you always said you would be. How did it end like this, Richie? 
> 
> The thing is, I know why. I was so stupid to believe all of that was true - see, you really did make me dumb. We should have never promised each other so much and we should have never counted on one another for support when, really, we were both too damaged to even hold ourselves up. I just wish that you had the guts to tell me that you broke, and that I was the one to break you.
> 
> I’m sorry that we tried. We were idiots to think we could survive together.

Silence settles between them like a dense fog, impossible to see through, thick and sickly. Richie’s stomach churns and he knows it’s not the alcohol. He wants to move but there’s an arrow pinning him in place, one that splices through his skin and breaks apart his brittle ribcage to the dusty beating thing in his chest. He only breathes, but just about. Mechanics of the body are suddenly a ponderous responsibility due to the laborious dictate of his aching heart.

It takes a while, or feels like it, for either of them to say a word, and it’s Eddie that does.

“I couldn’t remember you, but my feelings for you were so strong that I channelled them into the only coherent thing I could. Hating you, I guess, required no root. Loving you was a little more complicated.”

Richie’s face is wet and his nose is red, and his eyes want to stay shut and blind from the reality of the room in it’s cold and lonely state, only made colder and more lonely by these revelations. He thinks it all through and retraces their footsteps now with this knowledge, and ties logical ribbons around each notable connection. It must have been that Richie’s move made him forget Eddie, and so that powering on into unfathomably absent existence at the age of 18 was such a poignant moment because it lacked the presence of the boy he loved, and he knew it, but just couldn’t place it. It must have been why Eddie was so vehemently anti-Trashmouth when they met the second time around because the remnants of his passion remained on simmer, on standby, and simply misinterpreted. 

“I can’t understand how I forgot you,” the way he feels about the other man now is enough to cement the perplexity. “I’m so sorry that I put you through that.”

“I don’t remember it.” Eddie says flatly.

“I know, but I still hurt you.” Richie is woefully persistent. 

“Richie-” Eddie’s sigh forces a lapse of words for a moment, but inexorably builds dread. “I think we need to listen to this letter.”

Another blow to Richie’s stomach. You’d have thought he’d be numb by now. 

“What do you mean?”

“I…” Eddie audibly searches for the words that are summoned with heartbreak on their haunches. “It’s not right - not normal - that neither of us can remember our pasts, Rich. But whatever happened to us, it was obviously enough for us to need to push it as far down as we both did. And I don’t think I’m right,” it kills Richie to notice the tremble in Eddie’s voice, indicating that he’s crying, too. “I know I’m not right. My life has been miserable, my marriage is now a confirmed sham… I’ve been living a complete lie. And now that I know that for sure, it’s tearing me up. I don’t know who I am, and so, how can I give myself to you?”

“We’d work it out, Eddie,” Richie moves, sits up right, like he has a better chance at reaching Eddie with a straighter back. He’s so desperate, his chest is wrenched so tight, and he’s never felt so close to breaking. “We can be there for each other, we- we can help each other learn. We can remember and learn and start fresh together. Eddie-”

“-But what if we can’t?” Eddie interrupts, his voice steadier than before. “What happens when we uncover something bad, something that changes everything we knew about ourselves and each other?”

“I’d be there for you.”

“You can’t say that. You don’t know that.”

“I can. I do.”

“Richie,” a laugh tinged with sadness. “You search for hate on Twitter to make yourself feel justified in hating yourself. This whole thing is such a huge risk, and I don’t think you’re strong enough for it. I don’t think you’re able to take the love I’d give you.”’

“Fuck-” Richie spills out a whimper between clenched teeth, holding everything together, despite everything killing him. “-You can’t say that. You have no right to say that.”

“I’m sorry, Richie,” he speaks with a final tone that tells Richie all he needs to know. His mind is made up. “I just don’t think our love for each other can override all this uncertainty. I have to work out who I am. I’m sorry.”

“Eddie, Eddie! I love-”

Eddie’s gone. 

Richie’s shoulders shake as the phone falls from his ear and to the floor. He hopes it shatters for good. He looks around the room with unaided eyes that blur furthermore from tears, and like always, he sees nothing, and he tells himself that this is it. That this is his life, with or without Eddie. All there is, is nothing.

He finds the bottle once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the last chapter will be up either tomorrow night or sunday, thank you for bearing with me.  
special thank you to mickey who was a huge reassurance to me with this chapter in particular <3


	12. The Life & Times of Richie Tozier (pt. 2)

He wakes between grey, cold walls and a different kind of nothing. Instead of just feeling nothing, which is simply an ever-present notion, he sees nothing too. Endless nothing in grey concrete that make up four walls in a stretched out oblong in which he sits in the middle. Above him is a square of white air, so bright it seems to be a void, despite being less than generous in shedding any light on the grey scene below. Mould and moss dapple the greying bricks, and as Richie stares at them he counts, and wonders what number he would reach before condemning himself as truly mad. He sits without wondering much else, with an overcoming feeling like ash from a bonfire dusting his shoulders, telling him that this is where he’s meant to be. Wherever here is.

“Isn’t it obvious?” A voice snarls out with a greasy texture, and at last, Richie makes an effort to look past the bricks and see deeper into the strange space in which he finds himself. 

“What?” He calls back. Still, he feels nothing.

“You wondered for a moment where you are,” the disembodied voice answers with accusatory tone. “And it should be obvious.”

“It’s not,” Richie appears as nonchalant, and even rocks back to hold his weight on his hands. “But I don’t really care.”

“Good. That is very much the point,” The first thing Richie feels is confusion; not over where he is or who is speaking to, but why his apathy to the situation is 'the point'. The voice goes on. “It’s not where you are but why you’re here.”

“Can you stop talking in riddles, please?” Richie’s voice raises with a slight hint of nerves, and it seems with this that his minuscule catalogue of emotions are filtering through in through the cracks in the walls. “And come out so I can see who I’m talking to.”

There’s a laugh, and then it mocks him; “who!” and it laughs some more, deep and throaty. “You should be asking what.”

From a crack in the wall he sees a small white slither, wriggling into view, struggling with it, and then it flops to the ground. Richie watches as a few more of these shapes repeat the pattern, his stomach turning, and he dares to scoot forward to see the miniscule things from which the voice originates. 

It laughs as Richie’s face transforms into a depiction of disgust. A collection of maggots, laughing at him. What hell is this place?

The maggots begin to move and start to circle him, and Richie wretches. “You really should know,” they say with disparaging resonance. “You built it.”

Richie gets it then, his eyes growing wide and his head tilting to observe the building of his own design. “I built it.” He repeats.

“This is over 20 years of work. You built it higher and higher with every lonely day that passed. With every rejection, every act of selfishness, every incontrovertible ill deed, you added a brick, and with every brick you secured yourself a little more safety.”

“Safety?” Richie despises the use of the word

“How do you feel in here?”

He stands to distance himself from the crawling, grey mass on the ground, and shakes his head to stable the fact that he’s having a conversation with a collection of maggots in a self-made prison. “I wouldn’t say safe,” he says, and the things seem to recoil. “I feel… I feel nothing.”

“Nothing is tantamount to safety.”

Richie considers this, the familiarity of an emotional void numbing his entire body from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. He supposes, in some way, that feeling nothing is a method of self preservation he had opted to on many occasions. 

“You built this for safety, to shelter yourself from prying eyes and unspeakable horrors from your childhood. You resurrected these four walls to keep those things out, and-”

“-and in doing that, made it impossible to let anything or anyone in.”

If the maggots were capable of a smile, Richie imagined it would be totally ghastly; he cannot shield his imagination from the proposed image of it as the creatures growled, “exactly. Pure isolation in exchange for self preservation.”

“But I’ve been feeling more lately,” Richie says, like he’s pleading for forgiveness. “I’ve been experience emotions I can’t remember ever experiencing before.”

“Yes,” it says, impatiently. “That’s why you’re here.”

The maggots crawl around him and Richie follows; they lead him to a corner of the back wall that Richie had failed to notice. The bricks in this section are piled in, and though there’s nothing beyond the hole but more white void, it seems to cause the entire wall to sag. 

“We knew you were thick-headed, but honestly; you thought you could bulldoze straight into love without consequences?”

Richie cannot help but smile. “Eddie did this?”

The maggots, somehow, tut. “No. You did this,” they move away to Richie’s relief. “Eddie merely put the hammer in your hand.”

"I don't understand," Richie with a desperate influx that motions is hand towards his hair, and he rakes his fingers over his scalp, trying to hurt himself to point of apparently deplorable feeling. "Love is a good thing. It should be a good thing."

"On a scale of human emotion, love is at the top, and with it comes a full range of feelings you aren't accustomed to. Or rather, ones you've shut out for two decades. To have gone in at the top, you've irreversibly damaged your safehouse," the voice and it's words makes Richie feel sick. "we did send you warnings."

"Nightmares," Richie answers back with a brittle realisation, that the terrors that came to him in the night had motive to visit him after all, rather than just being a garbled re-imagining of inconspicuous details of his day. All the same, he curses the horror of them, and despises his introversion that allowed the nightmares’ amplification. "You sent me nightmares."

"We only wanted to prevent this from happening. We told you. You had to look at yourself first," it's voice seems to change, becomes tinny and robotic like the haunting spectre from Richie's nightmares. "We needed to negotiate. After all, how can you love someone when you barely know yourself?" 

Richie swallows, his trial against his own resistance to emotions going stale. "So let's negotiate," he digs his hands in his pockets and straightens up, doing what he can to appear somewhat strong. Beneath the layers of self imposed nothingness, he recognises his fear over what he's about to do. "Knock it all down. I don't want it anymore."

The pile of maggots go still. "You want to be exposed? You want to let in everything you've worked to keep out for two decades?"

Richie nods, only capable of this short, brisk action to convince both himself and his conscience that he's quite sure he wants to be totally vulnerable to a lifetime of suppression. 

“If you’re sure-” They make a movement that would be akin to turning their back on Richie. “A warning, though. Don’t expect sunshine and meadows outside these walls. There are things you kept out for a good reason, and this is a case of all or nothing. You cannot have the good without the bad.”

Richie is sure. “I get it now. And I want out.”

The maggots split apart from their mass and crawl in smaller hoards to each of the four walls. Richie sits in the middle of his internal prison and watches it fall apart, and lets in everything that had been shut out. He watches as a light splits through the cracks and welcomes its sustenance to a space that had withered without it, he watches as the maggots crumble to dust, their decay now redundant.

He feels life rush in as his breath rushes out.

* * *

He doesn't wake with a peaceful blink, or a stir and wince as bright morning light edges in. He doesn't quite wake with a stir either, or a jolt, but with a gasp and a bolt upright. Deep breaths and furious blinks follow as his eyes flicker around a white room and brain registration renders. He doesn’t know where he is, but he knows he’s in the physical world, and he thinks he’s alone.

“Oh, thank fuck.” There’s that - he’s not alone. 

It’s Eddie, sat by his bedside with his hands on Richie’s forearm. Automatically, Richie’s hand moves and rests over Eddie’s, and he’s moved to near tears in discovering that Eddie is not just a product of his strange, mangled imagination. 

“What’s-” he husks out as his head falls back to the pile of pillows. Eddie takes his hands back, retrieves Richie’s glasses from the bedside table, and gently slides them on for him. As his vision stabilises, the image of Eddie becomes so sharp, so bright, that Richie remarks him as angelic. He fails to ignore once his eyes have adjusted, however, the worn parts of Eddie’s face; the worry lines, the dark circles, the mottled tiredness making him grey. “How come you look like shit?” He uncouthly asks.

“I’ve been sat in this chair for 24 hours. That’s why, asshole.” Eddie bites back, but he’s smiling, and the hand that positioned Richie’s glasses has fallen to rest on Richie’s shoulder.

Richie doesn’t comment at first; he’s allowing his confusion to simmer down, as it causes commotion in his stomach. Eventually, he groggily asks: “What did I do?”

Eddie looks uneasy as he leans back into his chair and his fingers braid into the white sheets that wrap Richie’s body. 

“The housekeeping staff found you passed out in your own sick. You had to have your stomach pumped because your blood/alcohol level was ridiculous. I don’t know the figures but they were high enough for you to be at serious risk, and for me to be fervidly upset with you.”

Richie feels terrible; at first, this confusion made to simmer bubbles over, but then anger is thrown into the pot, along with a dash of self-loathing and a sprinkle of sickness, and soon he’s cooking up a disastrous stew of which he has seldom tasted the ingredients of before. A numerous amount of words rush to his mouth, but he doesn’t quite have the consciousness to pick carefully, and so he says something silly:

“What does fervidly mean?”

Eddie blinks, and then sheepishly sways his head. “It was in my crossword this morning. It means excessively intense,” He nods to a pile of puzzle books on the table beside him. “A nurse bought them for me to keep me occupied while I waited for you to wake up.”

An aroma of comfort swaps out the pungency of the mixture of conflicting emotions.

“I can’t believe you’re here.” Richie says, a timid smile creasing the corners of his lips.

“They called me because I was the last person on your call log,” Eddie says, as if it’s the reason why he’s here. “But I would have come as soon as I found out, even if they hadn’t called me to begin with.” 

The fingers that had scrunched into the sheets move to search for Richie’s hands, and Richie assists with their journey. He finds Eddie’s hands, or rather, they find each other’s, and they clasp together on Richie’s abdomen. 

“Why?” Richie whispers.

“I don’t know-” Eddie whispers back. “-Well, I think I kind of know. But I’m still working everything out.”

“I understand.” Richie says softly, the gentleness of his voice focused on so not to shatter their moment of nervous fragility. 

"If I asked you, would you wait for me? To work it out?"

A simple ‘yes rolls to the front of Richie’s mouth, but he bites it back and works on something of higher meaning. “You waited for me.” He says, knowing it to be true.

“I’ve been ripping myself apart. I’ve been so unfair to you. I don’t even deserve your patience, but-”

“I want to wait for you, Eddie,” Richie’s slumber ladened arm lifts and his palm cups Eddie’s cheek. “We both need to give ourselves some time. Confront some demons and work some shit out.”

Eddie pushes his cheek into the touch of Richie’s hand. “I’ve got a tonne of paperwork to sign, too.”

Richie’s stomach turns to stone. “You’re leaving her?”

Eddie sadly nods. “It’s not right. I’ve been bad to her. Well- she’s been bad to me, but I think it was of my own subconscious orchestrating. I didn’t know what I wanted, romantically, but the only boots I could think of for her to fill were my mom’s. I needed Myra, or anyway, I needed a version of my mother. It was like a habit. I was missing so much when I met Myra, but the only thing I could fully recollect missing was a woman to care over me to the point of suffocation. So that’s what Myra became. Someone to force feed me the way of life I thought I couldn’t live without. A step-in mother to a heavily repressed gay man.”

Richie is dumbfounded. Having Eddie open up to him in such a way is both moving him, reminding him that he is not alone, and devastating him. “I’m so sorry, Eddie.”

Eddie shakes his head, and Richie swoops his fingertips over a tear that slipped from Eddie’s eye. “It needed to happen. But it’s going to hurt both of us,” he sniffs, and Richie feels pride bloom in his chest over Eddie’s even mind. He thinks with some strange acceptance, he’s not leaving her for me - he’s leaving her for himself. “You can’t walk away from a 15 year relationship unscathed, even if it was totally toxic.” 

Richie smiles and there’s tints of melancholy within it for Eddie, but he says opposingly, “I’m happy for you.”

Eddie returns Richie’s smile, but the melancholy within his is burned out and swapped with something more hopeful. “I’m happy for you too, Richie.”

They allow quietude in for a little while, and then:

“Eddie?”

“Hm?”

“Can you kiss me?”

Eddie kisses Richie, without obsequiousness, without confusion, and most importantly, without fear.


	13. Outside The Wall

The room that promises to help him is a funny little place. 

Richie expected something stereotypical; a chaise longue, books on the human mind and all its wonders, some house plants, a box of tissues. But no such thing - save for the tissues - can be found in this $250 an hour safe space. 

He's on a sunset orange velvet couch facing the most eccentric looking 70 year old he's ever seen. She's called Martha, and only with her calming presence, she swears wordlessly to help him.

They stare at each other. Martha’s oceanic eyes are lined with sparkly blue eyeliner, and forked with laughter lines. She’s like a walking advertisement of her own succession, an ambassador of clean-minded effervescence and positivity. He’s the opposite - a blur of greys, pallid complexion, unironed clothes. While she looks like she’s brimming with plentiful things to say, he looks like he might not ever speak again, and yet, she waits for him. 

“I’ve not been very well.” He eventually says; an underwhelming opening to under-exaggerated issues. 

She only nods, but folds her glossy lips into a smile of warmth. 

The wall clock’s tick echos but doesn’t seem to move. Richie watches it and Martha watches him. Her eyes on him don’t seem to burn, but lap at his edges like a receding tide and in moments, he’s brave enough to meet them, and is safe in the knowledge that he only has to dip his toes in. Her knowing look would only go deeper at his discretion, when he’s capable of floating. For now, in this first session, he only needs to paddle. 

Her comforting gaze is enough to move him to speak. 

“I’ve not been for a long time, and I’ve avoided doing anything about it which has only made it worse, I think. Well- no, it definitely has made it worse. The thing is, though, my circumstances have changed and on the most part I feel better, but I don’t think I can rely on those circumstances for my mental well being, you know?”

For the first time, in a lull of gentle syllables, Martha speaks. “What’s changed?” she asks. 

Richie bites back his effortless smile. “A lot. But mainly that I have a boyfriend.” His tongue seems to relish the taste of the word like a new flavour whenever he says it out loud. 

Martha smiles and leans back into her leaf-patterned chair, appearing to relax as Richie steadily opens.

“He’s the main reason I’ve come. I don’t think I’d have ever made it here if I didn’t have him, because I’d have nothing to get better for. I want to get better for him, but for me too. Because he has reminded me that I can be happy. Besides, I want to be strong on my own. I know that now. He did enough to help pull me out of it, and I can’t rely on him to keep me out. It’s not fair.”

“Sometimes we need a prompt from a loved one.” Martha adds.

“Exactly. And I’d gone so long without any prompts that I’d just kind of settled into a tub of shit.”

“Ok. It’s good that you can recognise that. It’s good that you’ve had that prompt. Can you tell me about said ‘tub of shit’ though, Richie?”

With the repetition of his words coming from such a lovely old lady, Richie laughs stiffly, while his stomach flips at the prospect of diving back in the neck deep cesspit of his life before Eddie. Or rather, as the couple had strangely discovered, in the interval of them. 

“Yeah,” he begins, and each of his fingers clasp another while his knuckles blister white. “Well, there was nothing, really. I had an epiphany, actually, in which I accepted that the nothingness I felt was completely of my own volition. But all it was was a numbness. And it was comfortable for a while; it was like self preservation, I guess, so I had made myself safe. But after a while of that safety, the lack of feeling anything at all just became so suffocating. And frustrating. It wasn’t sadness. It's like… it's like cellophane around my brain, or like my skull is closing in and there's no room. It's a denseness that's impossible to wade through and it's just - fuck - it's so heavy. Makes my head feel like it weighs a few tonnes. I’d built a prison around myself and everything I let in, even if just a little happiness, or a little sadness, decayed inside my head. Inside that prison. The worst thing, is it's persuasive, it tricks me into some warped version of comfort. It slides it's arms around me and says "come back to bed", or it whispers so loud it drowns out reality as it's telling me that normal things are just too hard. I need to fill my car up with gas but it's picked up the gas station and put it on top of a mountain. I mean that literally. Going to the gas station, even if I'm passing one, becomes a chore I'm too lethargic to pull off. I have been having nightmares wherein my brain is personified and screaming at me to listen, to learn how to feel again. I was drowning in my own head. I was killing myself. I mean that. I think it would have killed me, if I let it.”

“But you didn’t let it.”

“No. I got pulled from it. But it was kind of like I’d been pulled from the water and stuck straight on a burning boat. I had got so used to being numb that it had kind of made me blind. Like, I didn’t recognise myself. I didn’t notice how old I’ve become. I lost sight of everything, including my identity, that when I started seeing it all again I didn’t know how to react. I was so mean to myself. And I was treating other people like shit, too. My manager - my friend - Fred, especially. I’ll never forgive myself for the way I treated him…”

“Why do you think you were treating him like that especially?”

“Well it was most likely because he was the closest person to me. That was my excuse. I think more realistically, now that I know better, it was because of who he wasn’t.”

Martha takes a moment to tilt her head with curiosity. 

It’s here that Richie takes a moment to register how much he’s spilled, and soon after that moment, he splits into a grin. “You’re good.” He says, and Martha nods with thanks before he continues.

“My boyfriend, Eddie, and I were childhood sweethearts. I moved away when I was 18 and then for some reason after that we completely forgot each other. Like a total memory wipe. We don’t know how or why we forgot one another, but that level of memory suppression I’ve found is pretty unforgiving. I think, in order to forget the bad stuff - which I’m still having trouble remembering - we had to lock away all the good stuff too. Like I said, I can’t remember any sordid details but something that I was suppressing was my sexuality. I didn’t pay the fact that I was gay any mind. Not at all. I just assumed the life of a sleazy heterosexual bachelor and lay down a self-fulfilling prophecy of a loveless life. I couldn’t fall in love. Now I realise that I was looking for love in all the wrong people. I'm not saying my love is subjective to Eddie and only Eddie, but I've always been in love with him and not known it so I've been subconsciously looking for him, for parts of him, in everyone. That’s why I was so horrible to Fred. He bought out this part of me that I’d blocked out for so long, because he was so like Eddie, but not close enough.”

"I see. You lost sight of Eddie, and you left with him your recognition of your sexuality."

"The two things went hand in hand. I'd had my first love. I mean, fuck - I'd found my true love - if that's such a thing. But because I lost him, I lost that gratifying moment of acceptance. I was always doomed to love all wrong, because my mind had erased every part of love I'd felt that was correct. I think I've been hitting my head against the premise of love because I set myself that self fulfilling prophecy of never finding it. I'd lost it, already. I just never remembered losing it, and I never remembered having it. Turning my back on the pain of losing him meant turning my back on ever having him, and even ever knowing him at all.”

“So in your mind, you subconsciously decided that you’d rather not know love at all, than deal with the pain of having lost it.”

“I think that’s what it all stems down to, yeah,” He breathes out then, like it’s the first time since he stepped foot in that vibrant room. He also notices that the hand of the clock has moved. His time is nearly up. “I’ve accepted now that I can’t feel the good without the inevitability of the bad.”

“You’ve been trying to live like this,” she moves her hand flat through the air in a straight line, “When life naturally goes like this,” she moves the same hand along the same line, but this time zig zags up and down. “Right now, you’re up here.” She holds her hand up at the highest point of the zig zag.

“And I need to learn how to cope when life takes its natural plummet.” He holds his hand at the low point of his own airbound zig zag. 

“Which we can start working on next week,” those sea-like eyes of hers shine brighter than ever, almost like they’re beaming with pride. “How do you feel?”

“Like that was the most cathartic thing of my whole life.”

“Good. Anything else?”

“Like,” he releases a sigh that filters out of every part of him; the top of his head, his spine, his fingers, his toes. It rushes from him, and as the breath refills his lungs, in comes a lighter feeling, one that promises not to weigh down his tired old bones, and one that swears not to bring bricks with it. “Like I’m ready to learn how to live.”

* * *

In the following months, Richie and Eddie beckoned in steady and new experiences for them both. 

They spent their days together reminiscing to the reaches that their minds would make, both nervous not to tread too far, but both willing to unlock the things they’d been so desperate to forget. They looked forward to their nights together that would see them learning their way through making love to one another, and held each other through the throws of their nightmares. It had been of great comfort when Eddie, after nursing Richie back to stable breaths in the aftermath of one of these dreams, had said that he suffered with them too. When Eddie went back to New York after his first stay, a few days after a letter had arrived for Richie. It was the first of younger Eddie’s letters, with the addition of a note that said, “let’s just remember this one. I love you, Richie.”

Richie continued his meetings with Martha once a week, every Friday. With each session he delved deeper, let out more, and helped himself - soon enough, self acceptance settled in. Eddie would visit at the weekends, so Richie always knew that he had the company of his boyfriend to look forward to after the effort of dredging through his mind. They watched a movie from their teenage years, as tradition, every Friday.

In September, Eddie’s divorce was finalized, and Richie stopped putting off the phone call to his mother. He called her on the 14th, and told her the news. He and Eddie moved in to a lakehouse in Michigan the following Friday, with an excitable Graham, and the promise that Maggie and Went would visit very soon.

In October, Richie, with the help of Fred, braved a series of shows in which he talked about his youth, his sexuality, and his (as he put it) better half, Eddie. 

In the front row, laughing in a way that conducted the audience’s laughter, Eddie sat.

And in the ruins of dilapidated walls, they pick up the good bricks, and lay something familiar yet ultimately new; together.

[To end; listen.](https://open.spotify.com/track/615JdFPIOTnVeFnSfbV7Mq?si=JH7MbGdeRTOj6qQV7j-rbw)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in the words of stephen kings chapter 2 cameo, I didn't like the ending.  
that's it. it's all over. x


End file.
